I started the week with the intention of reading and summarizing some of the many articles that have been appearing about how to resist the incoming Trump administration and its expected attacks on democracy. But in the last few days I’ve discovered something about myself: I still haven’t fully recovered from the profound disillusionment of the election. I still can’t find in myself the hard base of determination that a principled resistance requires, or even the fire of anger. I’m still processing my feelings of disappointment in my countrymen and sorrow for what my country will soon face. I hope to get past this phase soon, and do pass on a few resistance tips I’ve gleaned from the limited research I’ve done.
So I decided to write about that instead. The featured post “Resisting, eventually” should be out before 10 EST.
The weekly summary will cover the new Trump appointees, plus what we’re learning about one of the previous ones: Pete Hegseth, whose own mother has called him “an abuser of women”. Then there’s the collapse of the ruble, and what Russia’s problems might mean for their allies, particularly the Assad regime in Syria and the ruling party in the nation of Georgia. Then there are Trump’s tariff threats against Mexico, Canada, the BRIC countries, and practically everyone else. A few other things are buried in my bookmarks somewhere, and then I’ll tell you about the “Satanist coloring book” a Catholic organization warned me about in a fund-raising letter, and how it led me to a dark-humor marketing site you definitely should NOT use to get amusing Christmas gifts for your friends. (I refuse to be responsible for any demons your friends’ kids might accidentally set loose.)
The nomination battles are all part of a larger question: Now that the Republicans have a Senate majority — 53-47 after Bob Casey’s concession in Pennsylvania — will the Senate continue to be an independent branch of government? During the Biden administration (or any previous American administration of either party) the answer was obviously Yes. How many times, for example, did Biden have to negotiate with Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema to get some part of his program passed? He couldn’t simply demand that they get into line.
But MAGA is an authoritarian movement with no principles beyond whatever its Leader wants. It dominates the Republican Party, so it’s an open question whether the GOP has also become an authoritarian movement. Many claim that it has, and that if you were elected as a Republican, you were elected to obey Trump. Last week, Texas Congressman Troy Nehls said as much:
If Donald Trump says “jump 3 feet high and scratch your head.” We all jump 3 feet high and scratch our heads.
I can’t picture Joe Manchin doing that for Biden.
Come January, Republicans will control the Senate, so has the Senate also been assimilated into Trump’s authoritarian machine? Trump’s cabinet nominations, the worst of which I discussed last week, have raised that question: If the Leader can make you agree that Matt Gaetz should be the top American law enforcement officer, or approve RFK Jr. as the primary shaper of federal health policy, what can’t he make you do?
For the moment, at least, the answer seems to be that the Senate will retain some limited amount of independence. We got a hint of that on November 13, when the Republican Senate caucus elected John Thune as majority leader, rather than Trump’s choice Rick Scott. The Gaetz withdrawal (in the face of repeated leaks about orgies where underage girls were paid to participate) is a second sign. Trump was apparently unable to make senators repeat Gaetz’s denials and continue supporting him.
Admittedly, that’s a low bar. But it establishes that there IS a limit — something we didn’t know a week ago. What happens to the rest of Trump’s nominees will give us a better idea where that limit is.
The NYT’s Michelle Cottle warns that this is just the beginning:
[Trump’s] M.O. is to relentlessly pressure-test people and institutions. Those who don’t crumble at first are hit again. And again. The goal is to shatter the resisters’ spines, one vertebra at a time if necessary, so that they don’t just bow before him but rather collapse in a gelatinous blob. Like, say, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
A related point that I hope Republican senators bear in mind: You can never prove your loyalty once and for all. Whatever you offer, he will keep asking for more. If you have any line you won’t cross, he will eventually try to push you past it — and reject you if you hold, as he did with Mike Pence. No VP was ever more loyal than Pence, but it wasn’t enough. There is no “enough”.
Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley has no current position and no direct power, but I think it’s meaningful that she criticized both DNI nominee Tulsi Gabbard and HHS nominee RFK Jr. on her radio show. Ultimately, I doubt her resistance will amount to much, but she is demonstrating that Republicans do not automatically have to bend the knee to whatever Trump does.
Trump wasted no time naming a new AG nominee: Pam Bondi. There is things not to like about her as well, but at least she has some qualifications: 20 years as a prosecutor and 8 years as Florida’s attorney general. We can hope she doesn’t have Gaetz-level baggage.
Trump wants his AG is to make the Department of Justice into the partisan weapon he has falsely claimed it was under Biden. (Every DoJ investigation of Trump began with probable cause, and the indictments against him were well supported with evidence. I will have no problems with Bondi investigating or indicting Trump’s rivals or critics if she upholds those standards.) The question to raise with Bondi is how she will respond when her President tweets that so-and-so should be in jail, as he often does.
What’s the holdup? Transparency. Trump would have to reveal who’s been funding his transition efforts to date, and would open his incoming administration to conflict-of-interest considerations.
The night before Gaetz withdrew, a panel on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour” discussed the most recent sexual revelations and how Gaetz’s nomination probably wasn’t tenable any more. One panelist said, “I do agree. He will probably have to pull out. Excuse me, that’s a bad choice of words.”
The panel erupted into laughter and host Stephanie Ruhle quickly went to commercial.
and whether Democrats should abandon the trans community
That’s covered in the featured post. Spoiler: I think not.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has formally issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif for war crimes and crimes against humanity. … The warrants accuse Gallant and Netanyahu of violating the laws of international armed conflict by intentionally depriving civilians in Gaza of “food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity” by consistently blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza. They also accuse both men of intentionally directing attacks against civilians in Gaza in at least two instances. Deif is also accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, torture, and sexual violence.
Naturally, Israel is not going to turn its own government officials over to the ICC for trial, and Deif may not even be alive. So the immediate effect is more of a nuisance than a threat: Any time he wants to travel outside Israel, Netanyahu will have to make sure that the countries he passes through aren’t planning to arrest him. 124 countries are treaty-bound to arrest him, though some have announced they won’t. The US has never officially recognized the ICC, and President Biden has called the indictment “outrageous”, so Netanyahu should be safe to come here. (If his plane has to make an emergency landing in the EU or Canada, though, there could be a problem.)
The warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant could also complicate weapons transfers from European states and nations with laws limiting transfers in situations in which there’s credible reason to believe a country will use them to commit atrocities.
“We’ve already seen a Dutch court saying that the Netherlands cannot send fighter jet [parts], for example, to Israel. We’ve seen the termination or expiration of various arms contracts that the UK had,” said Kelebogile Zvobgo, professor of government at the College of William & Mary.
and the federal budget
Elon Musk’s DOGE is about to barrage us with disinformation about federal spending. Paul Krugman pre-bunks a bunch of it with the following graph, showing that federal employment has not significantly increased since the 1950s. (Those little blips at 10-year-intervals must be census employees.)
Don Moynihan covers some of the same information, and notes that the entire federal civilian payroll is about $271 billion per year. So firing all of them would be just a drop in the bucket on the way to the $2 trillion annual savings Musk is promising. Moynihan then explains what the government does spend money on.
Where do you think Musk can find his $2 trillion, if not in Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest we owe on existing debt?
Replace the US tax code’s 7000 pages and millions of word with a simple flat tax. It could fit into a few pages of simple English, making paying taxes simple and enforcement even simpler.
I’m guessing that neither Don Jr. nor the guy who originally posted this have ever done their own taxes. If they had, they would know that progressive tax rates add almost no complexity to the process, so making everybody pay the same rate would not simplify anything. What’s complicated is defining income. Once you’ve determined your taxable income, you just look up your tax on a table.
What makes defining income so tricky? Rich people like the Trumps who hire smart accountants to seek out every possible trick for hiding income. If everybody could be trusted to report their income fairly and accurately, the tax code could indeed be much shorter and simpler.
Bottom line: Flat taxes are not simpler. Period. All they do is shift the tax burden from the rich to everybody else.
If anybody honestly wants to make taxes simpler, I have a suggestion: treat dividends and capital gains the same as wages. If all forms of income were equal, I wouldn’t have to fill out the Dividend and Capital Gain worksheet, which is one of the most annoying parts of filing my taxes, and where I’m most likely to make mistakes. But of course, that change would hurt the rich rather than help them, so it will never go anywhere.
and long-term Democratic strategy
If you’ve gotten tired of hearing about how you need to work harder to understand and empathize with Trump voters, I have a conversation for you: David Roberts interviewing Dan Savage on his Volts blog.
At first glance, they seem like an unlikely pair to discuss long-term Democratic strategy: Volts mostly focuses on sustainable power and electrification, and if you have heard of Savage, you probably probably associate him with LGBTQ issues. But Roberts has Savage on to discuss “The Urban Archipelago“, an article Savage was responsible for when he was an editor at Seattle’s weekly alternative newspaper The Stranger two decades ago. (The current Democratic mood is remarkably similar to the post-2004 election mood, a comparison that also comes up in the featured post.)
It’s time to state something that we’ve felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America.
Republicans have long celebrated their identification with rural and small-town America (which Sarah Palin dubbed “real America“), and they openly run against America’s cities — not just Washington DC, but against all the cities. Democrats, by contrast, have never embraced their urban identity, or made the case that “San Francisco values” are admirable values. “The Urban Archipelago” claimed that they should.
[T]he challenge for the Democrats is not just to organize in the blue areas but to grow them. And to do that, Democrats need to pursue policies that encourage urban growth (mass transit, affordable housing, city services), and Democrats need to openly and aggressively champion urban values. By focusing on the cities the Dems can create a tribal identity to combat the white, Christian, rural, and suburban identity that the Republicans have cornered.
The Stranger apparently was (and maybe still is) one of those in-your-face alternative papers, so the article contains a lot of statements like:
To red-state voters, to the rural voters, residents of small, dying towns, and soulless sprawling exburbs, we say this: Fuck off. Your issues are no longer our issues. We’re going to battle our bleeding-heart instincts and ignore pangs of misplaced empathy.
It’s a little bit different from all those we-must-try-harder-to-understand-Trump-voters articles. This is much more like: If the morons in West Virginia want to let mining companies turn their state into a polluted wasteland, let them. If they want to rebel against vax mandates by letting their kids get polio, let them. It’s not our problem.
So Roberts and Savage look at the last 20 years and lament the missed opportunities. In particular, they lament the unwillingness of Democratic governments at the state and local level to build dense housing or expand mass transit into the suburbs and exurbs, with the result that city living has become prohibitively expensive, especially for the working class. NIMBYism among single-family homeowners combined with anti-gentrification and anti-growth sentiment among urban progressives has prevented the creation of the dense, liveable neighborhoods you can find in European cities like Hamburg or Berlin.
(Roberts and Savage make a simple observation: If rich people want to move into Seattle or Nashville, they will. And if new housing isn’t being built, they’ll outbid the lower classes for the housing available.)
By limiting the opportunity to live in cities, Democrats have failed to promote the lessons that come from urban life: that it’s not enough to be a rugged individual, that you have to tolerate and work together with people different from you, and that immigrants and Muslims and transfolk aren’t demons, they’re people you see every day on the subway.
One line to remember from this conversation: For Democrats, city building is party building.
and you also might be interested in …
“I want to be in the moment, just not this moment.”
DoJ has proposed its remedies in response to a court decision last August that Google had an illegal monopoly on internet search.
The proposals filed to a Washington federal court include the forced sale of the Chrome browser and a five-year ban from entering the browser market; a block on paying third parties such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products; and divestment of the Android mobile operating system if the initial proposals do not work.
I believe this case was undertaken in good faith, but you don’t have to be Nostradamus to see where things go from here: Google will adjust its algorithms to favor Trump, and the case will be dropped.
Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has been indicted for plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election. Now we’ll get to see how another democracy handles this problem.
Louisiana Republicans have just shifted their tax burden downward: They cut personal and corporate income taxes, and “balanced” it with an increase in the state sales tax, which even the poorest people end up paying.
The season of humility begins: The Washington Post has published its list of 50 notable fiction and nonfiction books of 2024. Illiterate schlub that I am, I have read none of them.
How bad has the UK been governed since 2008? This bad.
61 years ago yesterday, it was Sunday afternoon and I was 7 years old. My grandfather had recently died, so the grownups were in my grandmother’s kitchen, probably trying to work out what she should do next. I was considered too young to be in that conversation, so they parked me in her living room in front of the TV.
That’s how I watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald — live, as it was happening. I ran out into the kitchen telling people that somebody had just shot Oswald. The grownups patiently explained to me that nobody had shot Oswald, Oswald had shot Kennedy. Then they sent me back out to the living room to face reality by myself.
This was one of my formative experiences as a journalist.
and let’s close with something a little too accurate
During the stretch run of the presidential campaign, $37 million worth of Trump ads connected Kamala Harris to trans people, especially transwomen and transwoman athletes. It’s hard to know whether those ads decided the election, but it’s not crazy to imagine that they did. This has started a debate among Democrats about how to handle trans-rights issues going forward.
Republicans sense an advantage, so they will make sure those issues don’t go away any time soon. Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-SC) responded to Delaware electing transwoman Sarah McBride to Congress by proposing a bill to keep her out of women’s bathrooms and locker rooms in the Capitol. [1] WaPo’s Matt Bai laid out how this political trick works:
First, you single out someone transgender for unprompted cruelty. … Then you sit back and wait for Democrats to do the decent thing, which is to stand up for the right of any American to be left alone. At which point, Republican leaders step in to say, as House Speaker Mike Johnson did, that they’re “not going to engage in silly debates about this,” as if it were Democrats and not Republicans who are so obsessed with trans rights that they can’t stop thinking about who’s in the next stall.
Talk about obsessed: Of the current posts on Mace’s X-timeline, 76 of the first 79 are about her bathroom bill. All since November 20.
Bai’s model certainly captures how the issue played out in the recent campaign, as M. Gessen (who identifies as trans) observed:
In the wake of an election in which Donald Trump stoked fear about trans people — as in the much-discussed ad that warned “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — Democrats are now debating how much the issue of trans rights hurt them and how fast they should retreat from it. Which is remarkable, because throughout her brief campaign, Kamala Harris was all but silent on the subject. It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is obvious: Democrats could get on board the anti-trans train and start their own fear-mongering about trans people. My Congressman, Seth Moulton [2], is showing the way:
I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.
This is a tactic I remember well from junior high: If kids are picking on you for looking gay, find some kid who looks gayer and beat him up. Don’t stand up to cruelty, just make sure you’re on the inflicting side rather than the suffering side.
But while you’re doing that, make sure you don’t look cruel. So Moulton, who (like me) enjoys almost every kind of privilege American culture offers, is the victim here: People like him are “afraid” of the Big Bad Trans Community. But Seth himself is one of the few Democrats courageous enough to join in the smear against transathletes. He knows that the number of transathletes in women’s sports is vanishingly small [3], that identified-male-at-birth kids who have taken puberty blockers don’t have significant physical advantages over identified-female-at-birth kids, and that the only way Trump managed to find an example in the news that he could use to smear transathletes was to lie about a female Algerian boxer in the Olympics. But never mind that. His little girls are in danger and require his protection.
That’s how the game is played: Don’t attack. Just invent a “threat”, pin it on the target group, and then “defend” against that threat. You know: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.“
So let’s not kid ourselves about what the choice is. Democrats can’t just “stop spending so much time talking about trans issues”, because we never did that. Whatever we say or do, Republicans are going to try to connect us to the trans community. The only way out of that box is to actively join the lynch mob.
Is that really what you want to do?
Josh Marshall offers a historical parallel: the 2004 election, when George W. Bush won reelection over John Kerry. Like 2024, 2004 was a very discouraging election for liberals. Bush had won in 2000 despite losing the popular vote, so it was easy to look on his administration — torture, war based on lies, etc. — as an aberration. America wasn’t really like that. But then he got over 50% of the vote in 2004 (the only Republican to do so in the 21st century), so Democrats had a lot of soul-searching to do.
There’s at least a decent argument that Democrats lost the 2004 election over gay marriage. It certainly wasn’t the biggest issue. But Republicans, cynically and shrewdly, got state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage on the ballot in a number of key states. Ohio seemed like the keyest. … Who knows whether it actually turned the election. But it’s not a far-fetched argument given how close the result was. There’s no question that substantial majorities of voters opposed same-sex marriage rights at the time, though of course support varied from more liberal to more conservative states. …
I don’t think you get to the Obergefell decision in 2015 without 2004 or the whole range of marriage equality activism in the first years of this century. In fact, I’m also certain you don’t. And I guarantee it was an albatross and super annoying to tons of Democratic elected officials. It’s possible it cost Democrats the 2004 election. It generated all sorts of agita and in many cases anger that LGBT activists were pushing the envelope so hard.
Marshall allows that the parallel isn’t perfect, but it’s also not totally off-base. Neither is the comparison to civil rights in the 1960s — Marshall didn’t go there — when there were literal race riots in cities all over the country. Nixon won in 1968 largely because he could pose as the law-and-order candidate who would stand up to Black activism.
Once in a while, there’s going to be a political price to pay for refusing to beat down on whatever group is unpopular at the moment. We can’t ignore that price, but going the other way has a price as well.
One thing the gay-marriage comparison suggests is that we have no idea how trans issues will play in 2028 and beyond. Most voters in 2004 based their same-sex marriage opinion on ignorance: They did not know any gay couples with a public long-term commitment, so they had no basis on which to judge claims that same-sex marriage would lead to “the fall of Western Civilization itself“. Same thing now: Most Americans don’t know any openly trans people, so they’re easy to demonize.
A few years down the road, most Americans probably will know at least one or two such people, plus a handful of trans celebrities. [4] The conversation may be very different by then.
[1] In the WaPo, Style (not Politics) columnist Monica Hesse wonders if Mace knows how women’s bathrooms work.
Just so we’re all on the same page, here’s how public bathrooms work for women: Each restroom is cordoned off into multiple private stalls. Each stall has its own door, which fully shuts and locks. Each door either goes all the way to the ground or — more commonly — stops approximately 12 inches from the floor. This is not an open-plan urinal situation, is what I’m saying. This is a situation in which the most flesh anyone typically sees is a scandalous, tawdry swath of … ankle.
If, somehow, a sex pest were to infiltrate a women’s room and do something creepy — like attempting to spy under a stall — then the women using the restroom would and should call security to have the sex pest removed. That would be true whether the culprit was a cis woman, a trans woman, a man or six koalas in a trench coat. Creepy behavior should be policed; mere existence should not.
If Mace’s bill passes, though, it becomes someone’s job to check up on the genitalia of restroom users. The government itself becomes the “sex pest”.
[2] If you’re a Democrat who believes in human rights, including trans rights, and you’re thinking of running against Moulton in MA-6, please put me on your mailing list. I’ve been a very reluctant Moulton voter ever since he challenged Nancy Pelosi for Speaker in 2018. Politico wrote that Moulton looked like “a mansplaining young punk taking down a vastly more experienced woman”, which is generally how I see him. (I understood why Pelosi faced criticism from the left, even though I disagreed with that criticism. But that’s not where Moulton was coming from. He just wanted to be important.)
Moulton’s anti-trans turn has to be about his larger ambitions, because it isn’t forced by any local political necessity. Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate in MA-06 this year, so Moulton won with 97% of the vote.
[3] Apparently, one of those rare transathletes is on the women’s volleyball team at San Jose State. The WaPo outlines the current controversy there, as some schools are refusing to play against the Spartans. The article notes that the player meets the NCAA requirements for transwomen athletes (one year of testosterone suppression treatment), and quotes a rival athletic director:
I do think it is important to note, we have played against this athlete for the past two seasons and our student-athletes felt safe in the previous matches. She is not the best or most dominant hitter on the Spartans team.
[4] Slowing this process down is the core reason Republicans want to ban books like Gender Queer, a memoir that I learned a lot from. If you read such books, or attend plays like Becoming a Man, you may begin to think of people with nontraditional gender identities primarily as people. That will make it harder for Republicans to use fear to manipulate you.
My thinking continues to be dominated by the Trump transition and trying to learn the lessons of the election. This week’s featured post examines one of the lessons I hope Democrats don’t draw from the election: that we need to disassociate ourselves from unpopular victims of discrimination. “Should Democrats Abandon the Trans Community?” should be out before 10 EST.
In last week’s comments I took criticism for not picking out misogyny as the reason Harris lost. It’s true I’m resisting that conclusion, but not because I’m blind to misogyny. If we conclude that Harris lost because she’s a woman, then the obvious lesson to draw going forward is: Never nominate a woman again. I really don’t want to go there.
The weekly summary has three long notes that I could have hived off as separate posts:
conclusions to draw from the failure of the Matt Gaetz nomination,
a fascinating discussion David Roberts and Dan Savage had about Democrats claiming their identity as an urban party rather than running from it,
preparing for all the disinformation we’re about to get from Elon Musk and his minions about the federal government.
In other news, there’s the ICC’s indictment of Netanyahu, Brazil’s indictment of Bolsonaro, the UK’s economic underperformance, and a few other things. Expect the weekly summary to post around noon.
There’s no question, he’s the leader of our party. So now he’s got a mission statement. His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it, every single word. … If Donald Trump says “Jump three feet high and scratch your head”, we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it.
This week everybody was talking about Trump’s appointments
The worst ones are covered in one of the featured posts. In general, Americans believe that presidents should get to choose their own people, unless they go too far. Generally, the Senate revolts on one or maybe two appointees. At a minimum, though, Gaetz, Hegseth, Gabbard, and RFK Jr. deserve to be rejected. Picking them is a test of the phenomenon in the quote above: Will GOP senators really disgrace themselves because Trump asks them to?
and more election retrospectives
As the final votes get counted, it becomes clear that Trump’s victory — while still clear and undisputed — was anything but the mandate-establishing landslide he wants to claim. Currently, his percentage of the vote has fallen under 50% and is likely to continue shrinking. In both percentage and vote-margin terms, his popular vote victory is smaller than what he lost to Hillary Clinton by in 2016.
Lots of ink is being spilled to explain Harris’ defeat and what Democrats should do better next time. I’ve been unimpressed by most analyses, because often Harris did do the things her critics claim she didn’t, and didn’t do the things they claim she did.
The point my brain keeps sticking on is why so many voters believed things that just weren’t true. If you can’t explain that, I don’t think you’ve gotten to the root of the problem.
I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this until now — I noticed it this week because Truthout had an article on Thursday — but in September a UN Special Committee submitted a report on the situation in not just Gaza but the West Bank as well.
The report raises serious concerns of breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including starvation as a weapon of war, the possibility of genocide in Gaza and an apartheid system in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It documents the impact of the conflict escalation since 7 October 2023 on Palestinians’ rights to food; to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; to physical integrity, liberty and security of persons; as well as the disproportionate effects on the rights of women, children, and future generations more broadly. The report also highlights the ongoing attacks against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and refers to developments in the occupied Syrian Golan. The report provides recommendations to the General Assembly and Member States; to the State of Israel; and to businesses operating with Israel, that in any way contribute to maintaining Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied territories.
The report doesn’t present Israel’s actions as unprovoked, or paint Hamas in a positive light. Section IV, the first substantive section, describes the October 7 attacks and the ongoing rocket attacks on Israel.
and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
Programs to streamline government come and go. Al Gore led one during the Clinton administration, a fact that virtually no one remembers. Musk and Ramaswamy will lead a “department” that doesn’t exist: It has no employees and no budget. (They’re both rich, maybe they’ll fund it themselves.)
It also has no authority. Congress establishes the size and funding of government agencies. Trump apparently intends to challenge a Nixon-era law that prevents the President from impounding funds that Congress has appropriated. This will lead to a court battle that only the Supreme Court can decide, and could take some while to play out. It will be a test of the Court’s partisanship, because the Court obviously would not have granted Biden such power.
But even if the Court rewrites the laws and the Constitution to give Trump impoundment power, it still belongs to him, not to Musk and Ramaswamy. Maybe Trump will rubber-stamp the DOGE’s recommendations. But they’re bound to be deeply unpopular, so maybe he won’t. We’ll see.
In general, the American people are inconsistent on the subject of government. If you ask them the broad question of whether government is too big or spends too much money, they’ll say it is and does. But if you give them a specific list of programs to cut, they’ll support those programs. Typically, voters grossly overestimate how much of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, bridges to nowhere, and obscene art projects.
Trump pledged during the campaign not to cut entitlements, and some of his proposals would make the entitlement-funding situation worse. He is likely to want to spend more on defense, and he’ll have a hard time refusing to pay the interest on the national debt. Once you set all that aside, not much is left for DOGE to slash.
One thing is certain: We will be seeing a whole bunch of articles/tweets/posts about how stupid science is and how crazy the government is to support it. I’m already seeing tweets about studying the sex life of beetles, and I’m sure there will be many more.
Science is always an easy target if you want to make government spending sound ridiculous. Decades ago, Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave out the Golden Fleece Award to highlight expenditures he thought were obviously wasteful. Scientific research was a frequent “winner”.
I’m sure that silly research projects do occasionally get funded, but the bigger problem is that good scientific experiments often sound stupid if you don’t understand what the scientists are looking for. Ben Franklin flying kites during thunderstorms probably looked foolish to any neighbors who noticed. The significance of Galileo dropping weights off a tower was probably lost on contemporary observers. (“They fell. What did you think would happen?”)
More recently, the popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy came out of research on Gila monster venom, which no doubt could have been made to sound like a complete waste while it was happening. But what about the sex lives of beetles? Well, if a beetle invasion is devouring your crops, you might wonder about ways to discourage them from reproducing. Shutting down the beetle equivalent of Match or Tinder is probably worth a look.
and BlueSky
X/Twitter has been losing users ever since Elon Musk bought it and turned it into a safe space for Nazis, and eventually into a big in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. He’s made it much harder to avoid right-wing propaganda or to shield yourself from abusive trolls. (Brian Klaus has labelled it a “Perfect Disinformation Machine“.)
The big reason to stay on X has been all the other people who are there, including a lot of the world’s top journalists. (Frequently, I back up points I’m making in the Sift by linking to X.) But as the user experience has gotten worse and worse — a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” — restless X-natives have talked more and more about going somewhere else.
The question was where? One candidate was Threads, a platform created by Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram. But whatever advantages Threads might offer are overwhelmed (at least in my mind) by the fact that you’re just replacing one Internet oligarch with another. Mark Zuckerberg might just be playing Saruman to Musk’s Sauron.
At the other extreme is Mastodon, which is based on open-source software and exists in a variety of “instances”, in which somebody has generously decided to host a social-networking community on their hardware.
But since the election there has been a mass exodus to another alternative, BlueSky. Lots of the people I have followed on X — Paul Krugman, Chris Hayes, Michelle Goldberg, Josh Marshall, James Fallows … — are now on BlueSky, with more joining every day. This week The Guardian closed its X accounts and moved to BlueSky en masse.
I’ve been experimenting with BlueSky (and also Mastodon) for several months. As on X, I don’t post much, and mainly use the platforms to announce Sift articles. I read a lot there, though, to find things to write about.
I’ve generally found BlueSky a more pleasant experience than X, though I can’t tell how much of that is cultural and how much is baked into the software. (I’m told that blocking trolls is much easier on BlueSky, though I haven’t had to use that feature. People seem to understand that they’ll be blocked if they become abusive, so abuse is comparatively rare.) Recently, though, it has become useful in the same way that X has been useful, so my attention has been shifting in BlueSky’s direction.
I confess I don’t really understand BlueSky as an organization. Wikipedia says:
Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social media service primarily operated by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation based in the United States.
I’m not sure how the “public benefit” part works, but the corporation does have investors who probably expect to make money somehow. Ultimately, that might make BlueSky subject to the same forces that enshittify everything on the internet. So it’s hard to say how long this halcyon period will last. Long term, Mastodon is probably the more durable alternative, if only everyone would move there. But for now, BlueSky seems to be the sweet spot of short-message social media: more pleasant than X, more useful than Mastodon.
Jones lost a defamation suit to the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which he repeatedly claimed was a hoax. He filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to avoid the $965 million judgment, and the bankruptcy process resulted in auctioning off his assets.
The Onion plans to shutter Jones’ InfoWars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.
All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.
Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.
Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
The statement does not reveal the purchase price, but says GT got a “steep bargain” of “less than one trillion dollars”.
Nazis are apparently feeling emboldened by Trump’s victory. Saturday afternoon, a small band of them marched through downtown Columbus. The Columbus mayor and Ohio governor have condemned the march, though I expect we’ll wait a long to before Trump has anything to say about it.
Red-state Democrat Jess Piper divides Trump-supporting women into four categories:
Wealthy and well-connected. They’ll get tax cuts and they feel safe from Trump’s anti-woman policies.
Indoctrinated. Mainly by religion. They’re single-issue anti-abortion voters who explain away Trump’s personal issues.
Pick-me. Women who count on the men in their lives to protect them.
Ignorant. “I watched an interview of one young White woman who said she voted for Trump because he ‘brought abortion back to the states.’ She thought Trump was legalizing the procedure. Roe fell during Biden’s term, and she seemed to blame Biden for the ban.”
Rudy Giuliani’s illegal attempts to avoid paying his defamation liability have finally gotten to be too much for his lawyers.
The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85m below the Earth’s surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years, changing hands from the Phrygians to the Persians to the Christians of the Byzantine Era. It was finally abandoned in the 1920s by the Cappadocian Greeks when they faced defeat during the Greco-Turkish war and fled abruptly en masse to Greece.
The article estimates that 20,000 people might have lived in the underground city at its peak.
Some of Trump’s cabinet picks are merely unorthodox, but others are expressions of dominance.
The Roman historian Cassius Dio told this story about the Emperor Caligula and his horse Incitatus:
[Caligula] used to invite [Incitatus] to dinner, where he would offer him golden barley and drink his health in wine from golden goblets; he swore by the animal’s life and fortune and even promised to appoint him consul, a promise that he would certainly have carried out if he had lived longer.
Modern historians generally believe that if he made this promise at all, Caligula was joking.
Caligula once said that he would appoint his horse Incitatus consul, which was probably a joke intended to belittle the Senate’s authority.
In the old Roman Republic, the consulship had been the top executive office and was anything but a joke. When Caligula’s great-grandfather Augustus established the imperial system, he preserved the forms and rituals of the Republic and ruled from behind the scenes, not as consul or dictator (as his own uncle Julius Caesar had done) but as “First Citizen”. (In Latin, princeps, the origin of the word “prince”.) Caligula, on the other hand, had no patience with such niceties and wanted to rub senators’ noses in the emptiness of their formal titles. “You want to be consul? So does my horse.”
Matt Gaetz. The Incitatus story came to mind Wednesday after President-elect Trump announced that he would nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, a possibility only slightly less absurd than Incitatus’ consulship.
Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.
Republican Congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.
“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said.
Gaetz has a law degree, but no experience in law enforcement or the judiciary. He has been dogged by persistent accusations of sex trafficking and relationships with underage girls, though the Justice Department declined to file charges. [1] The House Ethics Committee had been about to publish a report of their investigation into his sexual misconduct, but Gaetz has avoided this by resigning his House seat to accept Trump’s offer. (Typically, members of Congress who take cabinet seats wait to resign until after the Senate confirms them.) Republican Senators have said they’d like to see the report, but Speaker Johnson is against releasing it to them — something he would obviously do if it cleared Gaetz.
I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker. It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.
Like Incitatus, though, Gaetz knows who his master is. He has been abjectly loyal to Donald Trump, and has said his is “proud of the work we did” on January 6. [2]
This is the last chance we’re gonna have of saving this country. And if you wanna get in the way, fine. But we’re gonna try to get you out of the Senate, too if you try to do that.
As for the mainstream media, sanewashing is still the order of the day. The NYT describes the Gaetz nomination as a “loyalist” and WaPo characterizes Gaetz as “outspoken“.
Confirming Gaetz will verify that two significant American institutions have lost their independence: not just the Justice Department, but the Senate also. It will be a major step in the direction of autocracy. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse refers to this as “the crawl test“, and Ezra Klein writes:
Demanding Senate Republicans back Gaetz as attorney general and Hegseth as Defense Secretary is the 2024 version of forcing Sean Spicer to say it was the largest inauguration crowd ever. These aren’t just appointments. They’re loyalty tests. The absurdity is the point.
Pete Hegseth. And that brings us to our next horse, Pete Hegseth.
Let’s start with the good: He has a strong academic record, receiving a bachelors degree in politics from Princeton (where he wrote for the conservative Princeton Tory and played on the school’s varsity basketball team), and then a masters in public policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard. [3] He was an infantry officer in the Minnesota National Guard, volunteered to be posted to Baghdad, and received a bronze star. He also served in Afghanistan and was promoted to major.
From there things go downhill. He was at first chosen to be one of the 25,000 National Guard troops protecting Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration (which needed protection given the post-January-6 threats of right-wing violence), but was removed as a possible “insider threat” in view of two tattoos: a Jerusalem cross and “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” an 11th-century Crusader battle cry). Either might be a simple expression of Christian devotion, but they are also associated with Christian nationalism and even neo-Nazism. [4]
Hegseth’s political positions have been described as Christian nationalist. In his book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he said he believes there are “irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process”. He furthermore called for an “American crusade”, which he described as “a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom”.
In short, the Crusades — a Christian war against infidels, particularly Muslims — figure prominently in his thinking.
His business career was undistinguished, and his time managing conservative political action groups raises more red flags without any proven wrong-doing. He ran a Minnesota PAC that spent 1/3 of its funds on Christmas parties, and as director of Concerned Veterans for America he hired his brother and paid him over $100K.
Hegseth was investigated for a sexual assault in 2017, but (like Gaetz) was not charged. [5]
But the reason he’s been nominated is that Trump liked him as a weekend contributor to Fox & Friends. He joined Fox News in 2014, and is best known for advocating pardons for war criminals, including Eddie Gallagher. (Gallagher was pardoned by Trump and had his rank restored, despite testimony against him from seven of his 21 platoon members, one of whom said “The guy is freaking evil.”)
Nothing in Hegseth’s background qualifies him to run a department with nearly three million employees and an $842 billion annual budget. But he does bring to the job an anti-LGBTQ and patriarchal zeal that fits well with Trump’s criticisms of the “woke” military.
Given his past pronouncements, and those of President-elect Trump, Hegseth is expected to end any diversity programs in the U.S. military, and perhaps retire or replace senior officers he sees as “woke” or who did not get the position through what he sees as merit alone.
His view of war crimes also aligns with Trump, who said after pardoning a different war criminal that “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”
How Trumpists see their team.
Tulsi Gabbard. This former Democratic congresswoman has been nominated to be Director of National Intelligence. The DNI is the primary liaison between the 17 US intelligence agencies and the President. The DNI’s office (ODNI) produces the Presidential Daily Brief, which integrates and distills reports from all the agencies.
Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz probably went too far by characterizing Gabbard as “likely a Russian asset“, but some hosts on Russian state TV appear to agree, referring to her as “our girlfriend Tulsi“. Gabbard has often echoed Russian propaganda about the Ukraine War. During her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, she received favorable coverage from Russian state media.
Less than one month into her presidential campaign, there were at least 20 Gabbard stories on three major Moscow-based English-language websites affiliated with or supportive of the Russian government — all of which celebrated her candidacy.
She has also been a defender of the Assad regime in Syria, a Russian ally.
Our allies are reported to be alarmed by her nomination, and there is talk that the other Five Eyes countries — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — may stop sharing information with us, for fear of where that information might go next.
Gabbard has no previous experience in intelligence. She has not worked for a US intelligence agency and was not a member of the Intelligence Committee when she was in Congress.
RFK Jr. It’s possible to describe RFK Jr. in glowing terms: He wants to Make America Healthy Again. He wants to take on the Big Pharma and Big Food oligopolies, and fight the forces that make Americans prone to chronic diseases.
Throughout the year, we observed an increasing trend in the prevalence of low-credibility news about vaccines. We also observed a considerable amount of suspicious YouTube videos shared on Twitter. Tweets by a small group of approximately 800 “superspreaders” verified by Twitter accounted for approximately 35% of all reshares of misinformation on an average day, with the top superspreader (@RobertKennedyJr) responsible for over 13% of retweets.
Then there’s the danger of fluoridated water, which is a John Birch Society conspiracy theory I remember from childhood. RFK would like to eliminate water fluoridation, due to various health problems that overexposure to fluoride can cause. But like so many of his causes, his anti-fluoride case is overstated and full of misinformation. Fluoridated water has proven cavity-prevention benefits, and local monitoring should be sufficient to prevent over-exposure.
Kennedy denies responsibility for a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, but he did play a role.
Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit anti-vax outfit he led until becoming a presidential candidate, had helped spread misinformation that contributed to the decline in measles vaccination that preceded the lethal eruption. And during his trip to Samoa, Kennedy had publicly supported leading vaccination opponents there, lending credibility to anti-vaxxers who were succeeding in increasing vaccine hesitation among Samoans.
That, in a nutshell, is the main thing to fear about Kennedy heading HHS: He’ll encourage public doubts about vaccines that have all but eliminated various once-common diseases. If vaccination levels fall below what is necessary to maintain herd immunity, those disease can make a comeback.
The U.S. is already seeing an uptick in some vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, says Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in New York City and author of a forthcoming book about the resurgence of measles and the growing anti-vaccine movement.
Measles outbreaks and cases of chickenpox and pneumococcal disease are on the rise in the U.S., he notes.
“When we see children in the hospital with complications of these things that we can prevent or at least decrease the risk of by using vaccines, it’s very frustrating,” he says.
As vaccine hesitancy continues to spread, Alissa and other pediatricians worry that other devastating childhood diseases like polio could re-emerge.
As for sticking it to Big Pharma and Big Food, I have a theory about that: I deeply disbelieve in Trump’s populism, and think that fundamentally he is on the side of Big Whatever. But RFK Jr. could still be useful to him by creating a threat Trump could use to shake the big companies down.
What’s next? These particular picks were so outrageous that many other nominees are passing without comment, like Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, Steven Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, and Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. And I’ve seen many people use the Simpsons’ worst [blank] SO FAR meme. (We’re still waiting for a Treasury secretary.)
It’s been hard to parody Trump’s team, because anything you suggest could become tomorrow’s reality. (Last week, Gaetz becoming attorney general might have gotten a good laugh.) The only real way to stay ahead of the game is to propose fictional characters:
Donald Trump picks Baltimore based developer Russell “Stringer” Bell as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
But to repeat a previous point: The question is what the Senate will do. It’s encouraging that Republican senators stuck by their own choice (John Thune) for majority leader, and didn’t give in to Trump’s choice (Rick Scott). Maybe that means the Senate will play the role the Founders intended, checking and balancing the President. At least sometimes.
[1] Not filing an indictment isn’t actually a ringing endorsement. It means only prosecutors didn’t think they could convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But according to Gaetz’ defenders, if there’s not enough evidence to send you to jail, you might as well be attorney general.
[2] Trump’s tweet announcing Gaetz calls him “a Champion for the Constitution and the Rule of Law”, which is the kind of up-is-down statement we’re going to see a lot of.
The rest of the new DoJ management team will also be compromised: Trump has nominated his personal attorneys, Todd Blanche and John Sauer, as Deputy Attorney General and Solicitor General. At least they have some relevant experience: Blanche was once a federal prosecutor and Sauer was solicitor general for Missouri.
[4] At a minimum these are anti-Islam symbols. The Jerusalem Cross goes back to the Crusades, and is also known as the Crusaders’ Cross. If I were a senator vetting Hegseth, I’d point to Deus Vult and ask him precisely what he thinks God wills in the 21st century.
[5] The Washington Post published more details about the assault Saturday, including that Hegseth paid the accuser to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
[A] detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar. … The accuser, whose identity has not been made public, filed a complaint with the police alleging she was sexually assaulted days after the Oct. 7, 2017, encounter in Monterey, California, but the local district attorney did not bring charges. Police confirmed that they investigated the incident. After she threatened litigation in 2020, Hegseth made the payment and she signed the nondisclosure agreement, his attorney said.
Once again, not being formally indicted for a crime seems to be the gold standard for Trump nominees.
Heller begins with an observation I keep banging my head against: All those accounts where Harris lost because she didn’t do something — almost invariably she did do the thing they’re claiming she didn’t do. She talked about kitchen-table issues, she had detailed policy proposals, she gave interviews, she reached out to every kind of voter, and so on. She raised money, she advertised, she had a great ground game. But for some reason the things she said and did didn’t register with some large chunk of the electorate.
This seems to me like the central problem for Democrats to wrestle with. Sure, work on the Party’s message, work on the outreach to Latino men, come up with more popular policies. But none of that is going to matter if your great message describing your great policies goes in one ear and out the other.
But why would it do that?
On the other hand, Trump seemed to do everything wrong. His campaign speeches were boring and largely unwatchable. He didn’t have a ground game to speak of. Any policy ideas — there weren’t many of them — were vague. (Does he want a 10% tariff or 20%? It seems like that should matter.)
Trump’s speeches at rallies, many people noticed, had a curious background-music quality: they went on forever, aimlessly, and people would come and go at will. The actual speeches didn’t seem to matter; they existed simply to set a vibe and keep certain broad suggestions (immigration big problem! Biden Administration so corrupt!) drifting into the ether. … Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age.
… The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece. This is the opposite of micro-targeting. The goal is for voters to meet ideas coming and going so often that those notions seem like common sense.
So when Harris described policies (or even Biden administration accomplishments) that benefit the working class, it didn’t register, because people “know” (from having run into the notion over and over again) that Democrats are elitists who look down on the working class. They didn’t listen, because they “knew” that Harris wasn’t talking to people like them.
Conversely, when Trump said immigrants were “eating the dogs … eating the cats”, maybe people eventually heard that this story was false. (Or maybe they didn’t.) But the idea that immigrants are causing problems all over the country was seeded. When you heard it again, you’d heard it before.
That’s how you wind up with a result like this: Harris won handily among people who were paying attention, but got clobbered among voters who just “knew things” without checking them out.
Heller points out that if you’re trying to seed the world with ambient information, it helps to have your own dedicated media organizations like Fox News, Truth Social, and ultimately X/Twitter, where your factoids can be repeated endlessly without contradiction. Democrats have the so-called “liberal” media, but the message discipline just isn’t there. As often as not, “liberal” outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post would pass along Trump-oriented ambience: Biden’s too old, the economy feels bad, Harris’ campaign doesn’t have enough substance, and so on.
In the old days, campaigns imagined that even fairly uninformed voters had an issue checklist: abortion, inflation, immigration, climate change, education, and so on. Just before the election, they’d find out which candidate agreed with them on those issues, and then vote for that candidate.
It’s another week with two featured posts: one I planned and one that just jumped out at the last minute.
The planned post is the obvious one: What’s up with these ridiculous appointments Trump is announcing? That post “Caligula’s Horse and other controversial appointments” should be out before 10 EST.
The other mainly calls your attention to a recent New Yorker article about “the ambience of information”. Trump won largely because voters believed a lot of things that weren’t true — crime is up, immigrants are dangerous, and boys are taking over girls sports, just to name the most significant ones. Harris’ message, on the other hand, never seemed to penetrate. For example, people would go on complaining that she had no policies, no matter how many she had or how she promoted them.
The New Yorker article points out something new in the information environment: voters who make up their minds based on information they “rub against” rather than read or absorb in any traditional fashion. I’ll summarize the point in “Harris lost the war of ambient information”. That should be out shortly.
That leaves a few things for the weekly summary to cover: the Musk “government efficiency” department, the exodus from X to BlueSky, The Onion buying InfoWars, Nazis marching in Columbus, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.
This week it was hard to think about anything beyond the election
That’s the subject of the featured post. Long as that post is, there’s a lot I didn’t get to.
In general, I am avoiding articles that predict the electorate will now get what it deserves. They’re emotionally satisfying, but I don’t think they lead anywhere good. However, I can’t resist sharing this H. L. Mencken quote:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
The stock market seems to be anticipating corruption, as well-connected companies saw their stocks soar after the election. The American Prospect runs through a list of big gainers, including the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and installment lender MoneyLion, which the Biden administration has accused of overcharging members of the military.
Another big winner: Elon Musk, whose net worth has now exceeded $300 billion. On the surface this makes no sense, because Trump has been an outspoken critic of electric cars like the ones Musk’s Tesla makes. But if Trump surrounds himself with oligarchs like Putin has, Musk will be one of the most prominent.
BTW, I would be wary of investing in Tesla. If Musk decides to screw the minority shareholders, will the Trump Justice Department protect them? This question illustrates one of the problems of shifting from a rule-of-law government to an authoritarian government: Everything becomes less trustworthy, so the machinery of economics gets creeky and slow.
One of the first things to watch is how quickly Trump’s mass deportation plans come together, and what (if anything) can be done to slow them down. In his first administration, he moved quickly to implement his Muslim ban, which met a lot of resistance and eventually was significantly delayed/altered by the courts.
but there’s still a world out there somewhere
Meanwhile, Germany’s ruling coalition has dissolved, leaving the current chancellor without a majority in the Bundestag. Expect a no-confidence vote in January and elections in March.
Germany’s economy has stagnated since Covid, producing all sorts of internal tensions. (Germany is one of the countries that would love to have the “bad” Biden economy.) In recent years the neo-fascist Alliance for Germany (AfD) Party has been gaining. Whether they can win the March elections is the next political disaster to worry about.
I’m not sure which narrative of the recent violence in Amsterdam to trust. It followed a Netherlands/Israel soccer game. In some accounts the violence was a pure antisemitic eruption. In others, obnoxious fans on both sides exchanged provocations until fighting broke out.
The Saints are having a slow start to the season, and were sitting in fourth, and last, place in the NFC South. A significant number of injuries have struck among wide receivers and the offensive line, and last week head coach Dennis Allen was fired. But there are signs the Pope’s prayers could be working: on Sunday the Saints won for the first time since September, holding on for a narrow win over the Atlanta Falcons.
and let’s close with some monkey business
Wednesday, 43 lab monkeys made a break for it after an employee at Alpha Genesis Primate Research Center in Yemasee, South Carolina left a door open. As of Sunday, 25 of the rhesus macaques had been recovered. Most of the rest seemed to be in the trees surrounding the lab complex, and occasionally jump back over the fence to interact with their caged compatriots. Police have warned people living nearby to keep their doors and windows locked.
News articles have been vague about what experiments the monkeys are part of, saying only that they “hadn’t been tested yet”, and so there was no public health threat. CBS reports:
According to its website, Alpha Gensis breeds monkeys and provides “nonhuman primate products and bio-research services” across the globe. The company’s clinical trials reportedly include research on progressive brain disorders. … The Post and Courier newspaper reported last year that Alpha Genesis won a federal contract to oversee a colony of 3,500 rhesus monkeys on South Carolina’s Morgan Island, known as “Monkey Island.”
Monkeys are uniquely valuable in medical research because they are so similar to humans. But that similarity also makes the cruelty of medical research uniquely horrible.
It’s really like follow-the-leader. You see one go and the others go. It was a group of 50 and 7 stayed behind and 43 bolted out the door.
I find myself rooting for the monkeys to stay free as long as possible. I occasionally vacation down the road on Hilton Head Island. The next time I do I’ll be looking closely up into the trees.
Tuesday was traumatic. How do we recover, as individuals and as a country?
There’s a lot for all of us to process here. About the outside world, the emotions roiling around inside, what we need to be preparing for, and so on. This post is a very quick and incomplete response.
One important thing I’ll say up front: This is a secure-your-own-mask-first situation. We’ve all been knocked off balance, and we need to get our balance back before we go charging out into the world. So do what you need to do and don’t feel guilty about it: gather friends around you, sit in a dark room alone, make art, play solitaire, binge on some silly TV show, whatever. Things are happening deep down, and we need to let those processes do their work. Whatever you decide to do next will benefit if you take care of yourself now.
Me. The hardest thing for me right now is re-envisioning my country. It’s been many years since I have seen America as a “city upon a hill” or the “last best hope of Earth“. But still, I’ve gone on believing that the great majority of Americans aspire to be better and do better. A lot of my commitment to writing has come from my belief that if I work to understand things and explain them clearly, then other people will understand those things too, and most of them will do the right thing, or at least do better than they otherwise would have.
This election demonstrates how naive that belief is. Some Americans were fooled by Trump’s lies about the economy or crime or history or whatever, but many weren’t. They saw exactly what Trump is, and they chose him. Many of the people who believed him weren’t fooled into doing it. They chose to believe, because his lies justified something they wanted to do.
Oddly, though, I am continuing to write, as you can see.
I am reminded of a Zen story: A man meditated in a cave for twenty years, believing that if he could achieve enlightenment, he would rise to a higher state of being and attain mystical powers. One day a great teacher passed through a nearby village, so the man left his cave to seek the sage’s advice. “I wish you had asked me sooner,” the great teacher said sadly, “because there is no higher state of being. There are no mystical powers.”
Crestfallen, the man sat down in the dust and remained there for some while after the sage had continued on his way. As the sun went down, he got up and went back to his cave. Not knowing what else to do with himself, he began his evening meditations. And then he became enlightened.
So far, no enlightenment. But I’ll let you know.
Something similar happens in Elie Wiesel’s recounting of a trial of God he witnessed as a boy in a Nazi concentration camp. (I haven’t recently read either his account or the play it inspired, so I might not have the story exactly right.) After a lengthy and spirited argument, this makeshift Jewish court finds God guilty of violating his covenant and forsaking the Jewish people. And then they move on to their evening prayers.
Election night. Despite everything I’ve said in this blog about avoiding speculation and being prepared for whatever happens, by Election Day I had become fairly optimistic. That all went south very quickly.
I had made myself a list of early indicators, beginning with how Trump Media stock performed that day. (It was way up, a bad sign.) Next came how easily Trump carried Florida. (It was called almost immediately, another bad sign.) Things just got worse from there. I briefly held out some hope for the Blue Wall states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) until early reports showed Harris underperforming Biden’s 2020 results (when Biden just barely won those states). So I was in bed by 11 and never got up in the night to see if some amazing comeback had started.
I had expected to be deeply depressed if Harris lost, but in fact I haven’t been. I’m disappointed, but I’ve been oddly serene.
No doubt part of my serenity is ignoble. Due to a variety of privileges — I’m White, male, heterosexual, cis, English-speaking, native-born, Christian enough to fake it, and financially secure — I am not in MAGA’s direct line of fire. So whatever trouble I get into will probably come from risks I choose to take rather than brownshirts pounding on my door. Many people are not in my situation, and I am not going to tell them they should be serene.
But there’s also another factor — I hope a larger factor — in how I feel, and I had to search my quote file until I found something that expressed it. In Cry, the Beloved CountryAlan Paton wrote:
Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, because we could in fact vote or contribute or volunteer to influence the election. But the scale of the election dwarfed individual action. The closer it got, the more it seemed like a storm. In spite of my propensity to latch onto hopeful signs, in the days and months leading up to the election, I was filled with a very painful dread.
That dread is gone. The hammer has fallen. My faith in the American people was misplaced, so I can now get on with reconstructing that important piece of my worldview.
What happened. As always, we should start with the undeniable facts before making a case for this or that interpretation.
Trump won. He carried the Electoral College 312-226, and also won the popular vote by around 3 1/2 million votes, which is not quite the margin that Obama had over Romney (5 million), and well below the margin Biden had over Trump (7 million) or Obama had over McCain (9 1/2 million).
So it was not a historic landslide, but it was a clear win. Trump had appeared to be ready to try to steal the election if he didn’t win it, but that turned out not to be necessary. Coincidentally, all online talk of “voter fraud” evaporated as it became clear Trump was winning legitimately. The whole point of the GOP’s “election integrity” issue was to provide an excuse not to certify a Harris victory. But with Trump winning, fraud was no longer a concern.
Republicans also won the Senate. Ted Cruz and Rick Scott retained their seats, and no seats flipped from Republicans to Democrats. Democrats lost Joe Manchin’s West Virginia seat, something everyone expected as soon as Manchin announced he wouldn’t run. In addition, Democratic incumbents Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Jon Tester in Montana were defeated. The new Senate looks to have a 53-47 Republican majority. (Casey is still holding out hope that uncounted provisional ballots will overcome McCormick’s lead. But few think that’s likely.)
How did it happen? At the simplest level, it happened because too many people voted for Trump and not enough for Harris. Because the US has secret ballots, there’s no way to know for sure who those people were. But we do have exit polls.
It’s important to phrase things correctly here, because it’s way too easy to scapegoat groups of people unfairly. For example, you’ll hear that Trump won because of the Latino vote (which is true in a sense that we’ll get in a minute). But if you look at the news-consortium exit poll, Harris won the Hispanic/Latino vote 52%-46%, while Trump won the White Evangelical/Born-Again vote 82%-17%. So if you’re looking for someone to blame, look at Evangelicals, not Latinos.
However, most analysts are using the 2020 election as a baseline: Harris lost because she didn’t do as well as Biden did in 2020. And that brings a second exit poll into the conversation. Biden won the Hispanic/Latino vote 65%-32% in 2020, and lost the White Evangelical/Born-Again vote 24%-76%. So if you’re looking for Democratic slippage from 2020 to 2024, you’ll find it in both groups, but the Hispanic/Latino vote stands out; the Democratic margin among Latinos dropped from 33% to 6%.
The Latino vote also stands out because it’s puzzling, at least to non-Latinos like me. Trump ran largely on hostility to non-White immigrants and a promise to deport millions of people, many of whom are Latino. Again, it’s important to nuance this correctly: Latino voters are citizens — non-citizen voting was one of Trump’s lies — and Trump’s prospective deportees are not. Many Latino voters are solidly middle class, speak English with an accent that is more regional than foreign-born, and are well along the immigrant path traveled in the 20th century by Italians and Greeks. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that as Latinos assimilate into America, they begin to vote more and more like other Americans. After all, Polish Americans may still value their Polish heritage, but they typically don’t base their votes on an agenda of Polish issues.
Still, I have a hard time believing that MAGA racism will respect legal, social, or economic boundaries. Puerto Ricans have been citizens since 1917, and they are still fair game for racist insults. Native Americans are sometimes told to “Go back where you came from”, which is probably Siberia many thousands of years ago. When the racial profiling starts, your skin color and family name may matter more than your legal status. Also, I would suspect that Latino citizens are much more likely than Anglos to know somebody at risk of deportation. I don’t understand why that wasn’t a bigger consideration.
There was also slippage — not much, but some — among Blacks. Biden won the Black vote 87%-12%, while Harris won it 85%-13%. Harris actually improved slightly on Biden’s performance among Black women (91% to 90%), but did worse among Black men (77% to 79%). (I assume that round-off errors account for the math anomaly in those numbers.)
Meanwhile, the White vote barely changed: Harris and Biden each got 41%.
Finally, there’s turnout. Total voter turnout was 65% in 2024 compared to 67% in 2020. However, by American historical standards 65% is high, not low. You have to go back to 1908 (66%) to find another election with turnout this high. The 2020 adjustments to the Covid pandemic made it easier to vote then than at any other time in US history. So it’s unfair to fault the Harris campaign for not matching that turnout.
Why did it happen? I want to urge caution here. After any political disaster, you’ll hear a bunch of voices saying basically the same thing: “This proves I was right all along” or “This wouldn’t have happened if only people had listened to me.”
So Bernie Sanders thinks this election proved Democrats need a more progressive agenda to win back the working class. Joe Manchin says Democrats ignored “the power of the middle”, which implies the party should move right, not left. Others blame the liberal cultural agenda — trans rights, Latinx-like language, defund the police — for turning off working-class voters. Or maybe Harris’ outreach to Nikki Haley conservatives wasn’t convincing enough, and the problem was all the progressive positions she espoused in her 2020 campaign. Josh Barro suggests the problem is that blue states and cities are not being governed well.
The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch for change from all this (or even burn-it-all-down), it didn’t fall flat.
Basically, whatever you believe, you can find somebody telling you that you are right, and Harris would have won if she had done what you wanted.
I want to encourage you to resist that message — and I’m going to try to resist it myself — because none of us will learn anything if we just insist we’ve been right from Day 1. We should all bear in mind that the US is a very big, very diverse country, and (whoever you are) most voters are not like you. It’s easy for me to imagine positions or messages or candidates that would have made me more enthusiastic about voting Democratic. But we need to be looking for an approach that inspires a broader coalition than showed up for Harris last week. That coalition is going to have to include people you don’t understand, the way I don’t understand the Latinos who voted for mass deportation, the women who voted to give away their own rights, or the young people who voted to make climate change worse.
This is exactly the wrong time for I-was-right-all-along thinking. Back in 1973, Eric Hoffer wrote:
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
So much of what passes for “obvious” or “common sense” right now only sounds that way because it is well grounded in a worldview that no longer applies. This is a truth that is easy to see in other people, but hard to see in ourselves.
We’re going to be in a weird position for the foreseeable future: Trump is going to try to run over a lot of legal, cultural, and political boundaries, and we need to be prepared to resist. It would be great to be able to resist from a place of rock-solid certainty. But if we’re going to turn this around in the long term, we also need to be humble and flexible in our thinking. Fairly often, we’re going to have to think thoughts like: “I don’t really don’t understand a lot of what’s happening, but I’m pretty sure I need to put my body here.”
Explanations we can eliminate. You don’t have to have the right explanation to recognize wrong ones.
Harris ran a bad campaign.Josh Marshall puts his finger on the statistic that debunks this.
In the seven swing states, the swing to Trump from 2020 to 2024 was 3.1 percentage points. In the other 43 states and Washington, DC the swing was 6.7 points.
Both candidates focused their ads, their messaging, and their personal appearances on the swing states. If the Trump campaign had been running rings around the Harris campaign, this arrow would have pointed in the other direction. In short: If you were a 2020 Biden voter, the more you saw of Harris and Trump, the more likely you were to vote for Harris.
I live in a typically liberal Boston suburb. Massachusetts is about as far from a swing state as you can get, so no national figures ever showed up here. Occasionally we’d see some ads aimed at New Hampshire, but we didn’t get nearly the blitz that Pennsylvanians got. And guess what? Harris slipped behind Biden’s performance here too.
Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro as her VP. This would be a good argument if Harris had won the national popular vote, but failed in the Electoral College because she lost Pennsylvania. But she also lost Wisconsin, where Walz probably helped her.
Also, Harris won the Jewish vote by a wide margin: 78%-22%. So Shapiro’s Judaism probably wouldn’t have helped the ticket.
Harris should have moved further left. We can never say what would have happened if a candidate had delivered a completely different message from the beginning. But I think it’s pretty clear that simply shifting left down the stretch, i.e., emphasizing the more liberal parts of Harris’ message and record, wouldn’t have helped.
The best evidence here comes from comparing Harris to Democratic Senate candidates. Candidates who are perceived as more liberal, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, generally did slightly worse than Harris in their states, while candidates perceived as more conservative (Tim Kaine and Bob Casey, say) did somewhat better.
I’m ignoring a bunch of the Senate races because I don’t see much to be gleaned from them. Jon Tester ran to Harris’ right in Montana and did 7% better, but Harris was never going to be conservative enough to win Montana — and as it turned out, Tester wasn’t either. Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks ran almost 8% behind Harris (and won anyway), but that’s more a reflection on her opponent, former governor Larry Hogan, one of the few non-MAGA Republican candidates. (It suggests that a moderate Republican could have won a landslide on the scale of Nixon in 1972 or LBJ in 1964.)
If you saw much election advertising, you know that Republicans worked hard to paint Harris as part of the “radical left”. I don’t think they’d have done that if they thought moving left would help her.
Things I think I know. I don’t have a sweeping theory, but I’ll offer a few tentative pieces of a theory.
We lost the information war. The aspect of this campaign I found most personally frustrating was how much of the pro-Trump argument centered on things that simply aren’t true. Our cities are not hellholes. There is no migrant crime wave. Crime in general is not rising. Most of the countries that compete with us would love to have our economy. Inflation is just about beaten. America was far from “great” when Trump left office in 2021. Trump has no magic plan for peace in Ukraine and Gaza. The justice system has favored Trump, not persecuted him.
I hate to say this, but it’s true: Ignorance won. And it will keep winning until we realize that we can’t win by playing politics as usual. This isn’t the same world. Knocking 100 doors is a personal connection that might win a small race — I don’t know that it can change the larger races. Trump’s folks weren’t knocking doors. They were lying to the masses through an extreme right-wing reality that most of us can’t conceive.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter. And that is why Donald Trump won.
It’s hard to know how important the pervasive misperception of facts really was. Did people believe Trump’s nonsense because it was actually convincing? Or did they want to support Trump for some other reason and latched onto whatever pro-Trump “facts” they could find? (Birtherism was like that. People who didn’t want to admit that a Black president scared or angered them instead claimed to be convinced that Obama was born in Kenya, despite clear evidence to the contrary.)
Past presidential campaigns have included some misinformation, but they revolved much more around philosophical disagreements not easily reduced to facts, like the significance of the national debt, or how to balance the public and private sectors.
One of the big questions going forward is whether Democrats want to continue being the reality-based party. I hope we do, just for the sake of my conscience. But if so, how do we make that work in the current information environment?
Harris had a steep hill to climb. Around the world, countries went through a period of inflation as their economies reopened after the pandemic. And around the world, the governments in power got thrown out. Here’s how Matt Yglesias put it just before the election:
The presumption is that Kamala Harris is — or at least might be — blowing it, either by being too liberal or too centrist, too welcoming of the Liz Cheneys of the world or not welcoming enough or that there is something fundamentally off-kilter about the American electorate or American society.
Consider, though, that on Oct. 27, Japan’s long-ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party suffered one of its worst electoral results. In late September, Austria’s center-right People’s Party saw an 11-percentage-point decline in vote share and lost 20 of its 71 seats in Parliament. Over the summer, after being in power for 14 years, Britain’s Conservative Party collapsed in a landslide defeat, and France’s ruling centrist alliance lost over a third of its parliamentary seats.
… It is not a left-right thing. Examples show that each country has unique circumstances. Center-left governments from Sweden to Finland to New Zealand have lost, but so have center-right governments in Australia and Belgium. This year the center-left governing coalition in Portugal got tossed out. Last year the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the incumbent center-right governing party in the Netherlands, finished third in an election dominated by far-right parties.
I’m reluctant to give this explanation too much credit, because it says this election was a one-off and there’s nothing really to learn, other than to avoid being in power at the end of a pandemic. So in that sense it’s too easy. But it’s also a real thing that is an important part of the picture.
Harris’ outreach to Republican women came up empty. I’m not going to say it was a bad idea, but it didn’t work. I haven’t seen an exit poll that specifically breaks out Republican women, but the overall slippage among women in general makes it unlikely that many Liz Cheney Republicans crossed over.
After Trump’s 2016 win, big-city journalists trying to figure out Trump voters made countless trips to small-town diners. This time, I’d like to see them hang out in upscale suburban coffee shops and talk to women in business suits. Why did so many of them stay loyal to their party’s anti-woman candidate?
Democrats need a utopian vision. If Democrats had complete control and could remake America however we wanted, what would that look like? I honestly don’t know.
It’s not like Democrats don’t stand for anything. I can list a bunch of things an unconstrained Democratic administration would do, like make sure everyone gets the health care they need, raise taxes on billionaires, ban assault weapons, cut fossil fuel emissions, and make states out of D. C. and Puerto Rico. Maybe it would also reform the food system and break up the tech monopolies, though the details on those two are fuzzy.
But a list of policies doesn’t add up to a vision.
Whatever you think of it, libertarianism provided pre-MAGA conservatives with a utopian vision for decades. Republicans didn’t usually run on an explicitly libertarian platform, but libertarian rhetoric and libertarian philosophy was always in the background. (Reagan in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”) Trump mostly turned away from that, and slogans like “America First” and “Make America Great Again” may be vague, but they also evoke something sweeping.
I can’t think of anything comparable on the left. The communist vision collapsed with the Soviet Union, and I don’t know anybody who wants to revive it. But in the absence of a political vision, we’re left with a technocracy: Do what the experts think will work best.
This is a problem a new face won’t solve. Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or even AOC is not a vision.
What happens next? It’s Trump’s move. We don’t know yet who he’s going to appoint to high office or what the agenda of the new Congress will be. Establishing authoritarian government is work, and he may not have the energy for it. Maybe he’ll get so distracted by seeking his revenge against individuals that he won’t get around to systematically destroying democracy. We’ll see.
I’m reminded of a story Ursula le Guin told decades ago, repeating something from another woman’s novel: A female character discovers her baby eating a manuscript.
The damage was not, in fact, as great as it appeared at first sight to be, for babies, though persistent, are not thorough.
Trump has many babyish traits. We can hope that he won’t be thorough enough to do as much damage as we now fear.
This Adam Gurri article is full of good advice, but I especially appreciate this:
The biggest weakness of The Women’s March was its lack of strategic objective or timing. It simply demonstrated mass dissatisfaction with the Trump administration the day after it began. The best use of mass protest is in response to something specific. It does not even need to be an action, it can be as simple as some specific thing that Trump or a member of his administration says. But it has to have some substance, some specific area of concern. Perhaps it is about prosecuting his enemies. Perhaps it is about mass deportations. No one doubts there will be a steady supply of choices to latch onto. Those seeking to mobilize protests need to make sure they do pick something specific to latch onto, and be disciplined in making opposition to it the loudest rhetoric of the protest.
This time around, I don’t expect protesting against Trump himself to get very far. His followers expect it; they will just roll their eyes and talk about “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. But protesting something Trump does will at least draw attention to that thing. We have to wait for him to do something objectionable. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be a long wait.
In the meantime, prepare. Take care of yourself. Regain your balance.
The Weekly Sift 