Once again, the government shutdown is failing to make it to the top of my list. It continues and I don’t yet see how it ends, so there’s not a lot you need to know about it.
The Gaza peace plan hasn’t fallen apart yet, and actual hostages have even been released, so it deserves attention. But I have no insight into it, so I’ll have to link to somebody else’s view.
The two featured posts this week are both Trump-centered, and I apologize in advance for that. The first looks at National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NPSM-7), which directs the government to go after some vast left-wing conspiracy that exists mainly in Trump’s mind. But it does provide justification to investigate Democratic funders like George Soros, and maybe even create show-trials around them. The interesting thing to me, though, is the amount of projection here: Trump is imagining that his enemies are doing what he knows his friends are doing. That post is just about done and should go out shortly.
The second featured post takes a step back from AG Pam Bondi’s unprecedented disrespect for the Senate in her testimony on Tuesday, and relates it to a general principle of the fascist mindset: the mystical identification of the Leader with the People. Ordinarily, a cabinet member treats a congressional committee with respect, because Congress was elected by the People and cabinet members were not. But to a fascist mindset, someone chosen by the Leader is closer to the People than any elected official, because the Leader IS the People. “Only Trump Represents the People” should be out around 10 EDT.
That leaves the weekly summary to provide that Gaza peace link, as well as covering the shutdown, the war against Chicago, new evidence of Trump’s dementia, the upcoming No Kings protests, and a few other things. I’ll try to have that out by noon.
A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence [against] foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Chicago and perhaps Portland are now under attack.
Climate change.Pope Leo spoke out reaffirming his predecessor’s opposition to climate change, saying that it should not be a divisive issue.
Gaza. A new peace plan is on the table. Is this any more likely to take hold than the previous ones?
Ukraine. I’m hearing very little news about advances on the ground in either direction. It seems for now to be mainly a drone war.
This week’s developments
The Trump/Hegseth Quantico speeches
Before the meeting of 800 admirals and generals called to Virginia, speculation was rampant about what it was for. Now that it has happened, we’re still wondering what it was for. I try to unravel it in one of the featured posts.
and the war against blue cities
This week, Blackhawk helicopters attacked an apartment building on Chicago’s south shore. The reality is just as crazy as it sounds. This is the topic of the other featured post.
I forgot to mention this in that post: The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland wrote a long on-the-scene account of the protests against ICE in Chicago, including a long interview with congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh.
and the government shut-down
It’s been a week and neither side is budging. I’m not sure what resolves this eventually, or how long it might take. Trump needs to preserve his authoritarian narrative — that you can’t resist him successfully, and if you try you’ll be punished. But it’s also hard to see how Democrats can give in without some kind of concession.
For what it’s worth, the public seems to be blaming Republicans more than Democrats: 39% blame the Republicans more, 30% Democrats more, and 31% both sides equally.
This is a situation where Trump-being-Trump works against his own interests. A number of congressional Republicans think they had a more persuasive blame-the-Democrats message: Let’s get a clean continuing resolution for a couple months while we work out the details, and not try to fight for policy changes yet.
But Trump keeps acting like a perpetrator rather than a victim. He wants to use the shutdown to fire more federal workers. He’s trolling Democratic leaders in insulting ways. He’s illegally using government websites and even out-of-office messages to make his political points.
Democrats, meanwhile, have a pretty good ask: Subsidies for ObamaCare healthcare policies are ending, and they want to get them re-funded. So they’re fighting to keep healthcare costs down for millions of Americans, including many Trump voters.
and Gaza
Trump put forward a peace proposal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which Hamas gave qualified agreement to. Trump pounced on this as a win, making it hard for Netanyahu to back out.
I’m skeptical, though The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit is less so: She considers it possible that the first step — release of Hamas’ remaining hostages in exchange for a ceasefire and release of about 2000 of Israel’s Palestinian prisoners — may go forward.
Speculation about Trump’s mental health has been ramping up lately for a number of reasons. His 70-minute ramble to the generals (see the featured post) was more muddled than usual, and he seemed tired. Governor Pritzker has raised the possibility that Trump’s bizarre posts about Portland and Chicago are demented. A judge Trump appointed himself said that his claims were “untethered to the facts“.
And why would Google need to put its thumb on the scale?
Henry Kissinger once lampooned Argentina’s strategic significance by calling it “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica”. Argentina’s economy (the 23rd largest in the world, just behind Belgium) is also not particularly important. But the Trump administration is willing to risk $20 billion of taxpayer money to shore up Argentina just before a major election.
Why? The current president Javier Milei, is a Trump flatterer and a mini-Trump himself. And like Trump, he is very unpopular.
Milei earned many admirers on the right for undertaking a blitz of free-market reforms. Those included slashing government subsidies and regulations, in addition to thinning public sector ranks by 50,000 employees. In return, Trump has referred to Milei as his “favorite president” and offered an endorsement for his re-election.
Also, some well-connected hedge funds have interests in Argentina.
“Donald Trump gets a two-fer here,” [Senator Elizabeth] Warren said. “He gets to bail out his political ally in Argentina, who is very unpopular and in big trouble, and his treasury secretary apparently gets to help his hedge fund buddies.”
Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittifciation” to explain what has happened to all major internet platforms and services, such as Facebook and Twitter: They draw an audience by providing a convenient service, but then become profitable by abusing that audience after it gets locked in.
In this Guardian article, Doctorow explains in detail the enshittifcation of Amazon, which ensnared not just consumers, but the merchants who provide the products Amazon sells. He explains why the market itself will never fix Amazon, and how it has become impervious to individual action. Only regulation can solve the problem.
The path to a better Amazon doesn’t lie through consumer activism, or appeals to the its conscience. … Systemic problems have systemic solutions, not individual ones. You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly.
and let’s close with something festive
If you’re not finding a lot to dance about these days, maybe you should look at this collection of the 20 greatest dance routines.
I went to graduate school in Chicago during the 80s and lived there for six years. I’ve been back many times since and marveled at how much safer the city is today than 40-50 years ago. Then, I had a car stolen and two bicycles. My future wife was accosted on a sidewalk, and managed to push her attacker away. But in recent years, I have walked anywhere I wanted, including a number of places I would not have dared in the 80s, despite being younger, fitter, and less cautious then.
One neighborhood I stayed away from then, perhaps foolishly, was the Hispanic area on the near South Side. But a few years ago, I went to the National Museum of Mexican Art on 19th Street. A lovely middle-class neighborhood has grown up in that area, and the museum itself is wonderful. These days, Mexican-American can be just another Chicago ethnicity, like Italian-American or Irish-American.
There is, of course, still crime in Chicago (as there is not just in every city, but in small towns as well), and places I would not want to go at night. But in every measurable way, the city is much safer now. You can see that if you take the famous Architecture Boat Tour on the Chicago River. The gentrification of downtown began in the 1970s with the Marina Towers, which were built to be a fortress against the rest of Chicago: You could park your car and even moor your boat without exposing yourself to the public. But as the decades went by, the buildings became more and more open to the city, built to highlight the public riverwalk. From the river, you can see the record of the gradual unfolding of Chicagoans’ confidence.
So I have taken it personally when Trump has repeatedly smeared Chicago as a crime-ridden hellhole. And in particular, I object to his scapegoating of Hispanic immigrants as some kind of vermin to be eliminated.
I have to wonder what troops can do that other federal agents aren’t already doing. Agents from ICE, the Border Patrol, the FBI, BATF, and DHS have been wearing military fatigues, sporting heavy weapons, and conducting military-style attacks.
Federal agents rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters. Dozens of others, their faces hidden behind masks, arrived in moving trucks. In total, 300 officers stormed a South Side apartment building that Department of Homeland Security officials say harbored criminals.
Maybe, maybe not. But the building also contained US citizens and families with children.
Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.
… The feds also claimed the South Shore neighborhood was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates,” but DHS gave no evidence to support the assertion, and authorities did not confirm that any of the people arrested were members of the Venezuelan gang.
Rodrick Johnson, 67, is one of many residents who were detained by federal agents during the South Shore raid. A U.S. citizen, he said agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties.
Johnson said he was left tied up outside the building for nearly three hours before agents finally let him go.
Many of the residents were said to be Venezuelan. I wonder if the regime would be similarly brutal in a White neighborhood.
Last Sunday, though, masked agents in military style dress marched through some of the most upscale and touristy parts of the city, not far from where you’d board that boat tour I mentioned.
Agents, some masked, walked north on Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park toward the Wrigley Building. They then walked down Wacker Drive near Trump Tower, while some headed to the Riverwalk. They then made their way to River North.
The point here could only have been intimidation. They were not pursuing criminals or making arrests. Governor Pritzker has it right:
One thing is clear: none of what Trump is doing is making Illinois safer. This is not about fighting crime or about public safety. This is about sowing fear and intimidation and division among Americans.
Portland. Yesterday’s announcement sounded like a classic good-news/bad-news joke: Trump was pulling the last 300 federalized California National Guard troops out of Los Angeles … so that he could send them to Portland. He had previously tried to federalize Oregon National Guard troops to invade Portland, but a federal judge he appointed himselfblocked that plan with a temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit from Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, the mayor of Portland, and numerous other state and local officials.
Judge Karin Immergut observed that in an earlier case (concerning Los Angeles) the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had overturned a similar restraining order because courts owe “a great deal of deference” to a president’s judgment that conditions on the ground justify his decision to deploy National Guard troops. Specifically, that the federal government is unable to execute the laws with less extraordinary forces.
But Immergut contrasted the relatively peaceful situation of Portland (where the most serious protests had happened in June, but by September had faded to predominantly nonviolent protests drawing 20-50 people per day) with the more serious situation in LA prior to the president’s declaration.
Here, this Court concludes that the President did not have a “colorable basis” to invoke § 12406(3) to federalize the National Guard because the situation on the ground belied an inability of federal law enforcement officers to execute federal law. The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.
In a hearing Sunday night, Judge Immergut asked a Trump administration attorney: “How could bringing in federalised national guard from California not be in direct contravention of the [decision] I issued yesterday?”
She extended her order to block the Trump regime from deploying any National Guard troops to Portland.
I’m encouraged by the fact that an appointee from Trump’s first term sees the law this way. I hope some similarly-minded judge gets the Chicago case.
Lack of response leaves a lot of room for projection.
Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosted an unusual meeting: America’s top generals and admirals, 800 or so of them, were called to Quantico from around the world to listen to Hegseth in person. And once the meeting was on the calendar, President Trump decided he should speak too.
DoD rules prohibit uniformed members of the military from participating in political events. Directive 1344.10 allows attendance at a political rally
provided the member is not in uniform and does not otherwise act in a manner that could reasonably give rise to the inference or appearance of official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement.
So for generals and admirals to show up in uniform at Hegseth’s meeting at all, they couldn’t view it as “partisan political activity”. In particular, it was not a Trump rally. They were attending to receive instructions from their civilian leadership, so that they could interpret that top-level guidance to their subordinates.
Typically, when you are receiving instructions from those above you in the chain of command, you don’t cheer or boo or heckle or stomp your feet. You listen, take notes, and think about what this means for your particular command. And if something you hear sounds political, you avoid “the inference or appearance of … endorsement”.
So that’s what the generals did.
One thing we know about Donald Trump is that he does not compartmentalize. For most of us, compartmentalization is such an integral part of being an adult that it’s hard to imagine someone going through life without it. Sometimes you speak as friend, as a colleague, as a parent, as a polite stranger, or in some other role. Depending on what role you are in, you may seem like a completely different person. You would no more confuse those roles than you would show up at work in your pajamas or wear a tuxedo to the beach.
But Donald Trump is, at every moment, Donald Trump acting in the interests of Donald Trump. The particular role the situation seems to call for makes no difference. So at the Quantico meeting he was not playing the role of President of the United States, or Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, or any other role. He was Donald Trump being Donald Trump.
Trump loves crowds, loves to rouse them, and loves to hear them cheer. He is used to the crowds that show up at his political rallies, so that’s how he spoke to the generals. He rambled, baited his enemies, threw red meat to his fans, and voiced weird sentiments that any other president would have restrained himself from saying out loud.
The generals took it all in without response. This left a lot of room for interpretation.
That’s a lot to sort out. But I present that range of reactions to emphasize that you should take everybody’s interpretation (including mine) with a grain of salt. Some reporters may have spoken to a few of the generals themselves — none of whom talk to me — but I doubt that anybody has interviewed a representative sample of them. So we’re all just applying what we think we know about the military mindset and speculating from there.
The speculation began before the meeting started. From the first announcement, it was an odd event. Gathering all our military leaders together in one room is a huge security risk; one well-placed bomb and the greatest military force in the world would be led by J. D. Vance and a bunch of colonels. It was also expensive. The generals came from all over the world, and many probably traveled with their staffs. It was also expensive in another sense: Probably these guys all had things they were supposed to be doing, and many of those things probably went undone for a few days.
So the before-the-fact speculation revolved around one question: What could Hegseth and Trump have in mind that would be worth all this? Retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges made an alarming guess:
July 1935 German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weimar constitution was void and that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Führer. Most generals took the new oath to keep their positions.
Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad. Hegseth’s speech is here and Trump’s is here. Neither was worth flying around the world to hear in person, but they weren’t sign-or-else demands for a loyalty pledge. So we’re still just guessing about what the meeting was supposed to accomplish.
And as so often happens in the Trump administration, at times the absurdity overwhelmed the content. One way to watch the event is to view Hegseth as the comedian who warms up the crowd before the song-and-dance act comes on. The reaction that the generals might have had the hardest time suppressing was laughing out loud.
I mean, think about it: Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in America’s history, declared that “promotions across the joint force will be based on one thing: merit; colorblind, gender-neutral, merit based”. There is no definition of merit under which Hegseth becomes Secretary of Defense. No one with Hegseth’s resume could rise this high without being a White man, but we’re supposed to believe that everything in the Trump administration is colorblind and gender-neutral.
The Trump military, Hegseth said, would promote top performers and “get rid of poor performers more quickly”. But of course, Hegseth himself is a poor performer. He endangered the security of a combat mission by discussing its details over an unclassified nonmilitary channel with uncleared civilians present, a blunder that would have gotten him fired in any previous administration. But he suffered no consequences, because standards are only for the lower ranks, not Trump’s inner circle.
The gist of Hegseth’s speech called for the military to better match the John-Wayne-movie image of the military Trump sees in his mind: more manly, more fit, clean-shaven. (Talk to Generals Grant and Lee about the military importance of shaving.) If servicemen don’t want to shave their beards, “it’s time for a new position or a new profession”. But the past administration was wrong “to kick out Americans who refused an emergency vaccine” — as if a beard were a bigger threat to combat readiness than being unvaccinated during a pandemic.
And then, just before yielding the stage to the grossly obese Trump, he derided “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon”.
Hilarious.
Note: This image is AI-generated.
Of course, this image of manliness is going to have real consequences for military people who are transgender or female or perhaps even non-White or non-Christian. Each of the leaders in the audience has a decision to make: Are they going to stay loyal to their people and try to shield them from those consequences, or will they offer them up as sacrifices to the new regime?
Now we get to Trump. It’s hard to know what to make of Trump’s speech, because he blathered for 70 minutes. Much of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness consists of random thoughts that have no consequences. For example, he mused about bringing back battleships, which were already mostly obsolete when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way. You know, we have — Secretary of the Navy came to me — because I look at the Iowa out in California and I look at different ships in the old pictures. I used to watch Victory at Sea. I love Victory at Sea. Look at these admirals. It’s got to be your all time — in black and white. And I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them and man, nothing was going to stop. There were 20 deep and they were in a straight line and there was nothing going to stop them. And we actually talk about, you know, those ships. Some people would say, no, that’s old technology. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s old technology when you look at those guns, but it’s something we’re actually considering, the concept of battleship, nice six-inch size, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away. Now those ships, they don’t make them that way anymore. But you look at it, and — your secretary likes it and I’m sort of open to it. And bullets are a lot less expensive than missiles, a lot of — a lot of reasons. I should take a vote, but I’m afraid to take that vote because I may get voted out on that one. But I tell you, it’s something we’re seriously considering. They were powers. They were big powers. They were just about as mean and scary as you could be, and so we’re looking at that.
That’s the kind of thing you nod your head to and then say, “Sure, Grandpa. Can I get you a glass of water? Do you need to go to the bathroom?”
Other parts of the speech seem more serious, and maybe they were, but who can say? Much has been made of Trump saying that “America is under invasion from within”, which doesn’t actually make any sense. He blathered about removing “1700 career criminals” from Washington DC, which seems to be all the people arrested for immigration offenses during his military crackdown, many of whom either had no non-immigration criminal record or minor offenses like traffic violations.
It’s hard to know what to think about this. During the campaign, he painted a picture of major cities afflicted by an “immigrant crime wave” that no one else could find in the statistics. (Cities with lots of immigrants had no worse crime that cities with few.) Maybe no one has told him that this was nonsense, so he honestly imagines that his military sweeps are achieving long-term results. (Violent crime indeed was cut in half during his occupation of DC. But was the cause really “1700 career criminals” who are now off the streets permanently? Or did the native-born muggers and carjackers just stay home during the occupation, and will return as soon as the troops go away?)
Reading the transcript, again and again I found myself wondering: Does he really believe all this? Maybe he’s surrounded by people who feed his delusions so that he can live in a pleasant fantasy world where his inspired leadership has made America “the hottest country anywhere in the world”, and he’s stopping wars right and left.
So I wonder: Is that what the generals heard?
Military people, in my experience, are practical fact-based people. They are surrounded by bullshitters (like contractors who make extreme promises about the latest whiz-bang they’re building), and they can be bullshitters themselves sometimes, so they develop a good ear for claims that can’t be verified.
If that’s an accurate picture, then they were well aware that Trump was describing a fantasy world. And they wondered, as I did, whether or not he believed in it. If they concluded that he did, then I imagine that they are very afraid right now. Not just their careers, but possibly their lives and the lives of their troops as well, depend on surviving under the Mad King for another three years.
A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence [against] foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Chicago and perhaps Portland are now under attack.
Climate change.Pope Leo spoke out reaffirming his predecessor’s opposition to climate change, saying that it should not be a divisive issue.
Gaza. A new peace plan is on the table. Is this any more likely to take hold than the previous ones?
Ukraine. I’m hearing very little news about advances on the ground in either direction. It seems for now to be mainly a drone war.
This week’s developments
The Trump/Hegseth Quantico speeches
Before the meeting of 800 admirals and generals called to Virginia, speculation was rampant about what it was for. Now that it has happened, we’re still wondering what it was for. I try to unravel it in one of the featured posts.
and the war against blue cities
This week, Blackhawk helicopters attacked an apartment building on Chicago’s south shore. The reality is just as crazy as it sounds. This is the topic of the other featured post.
I forgot to mention this in that post: The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland wrote a long on-the-scene account of the protests against ICE in Chicago, including a long interview with congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh.
and the government shut-down
It’s been a week and neither side is budging. I’m not sure what resolves this eventually, or how long it might take. Trump needs to preserve his authoritarian narrative — that you can’t resist him successfully, and if you try you’ll be punished. But it’s also hard to see how Democrats can give in without some kind of concession.
For what it’s worth, the public seems to be blaming Republicans more than Democrats: 39% blame the Republicans more, 30% Democrats more, and 31% both sides equally.
This is a situation where Trump-being-Trump works against his own interests. A number of congressional Republicans think they had a more persuasive blame-the-Democrats message: Let’s get a clean continuing resolution for a couple months while we work out the details, and not try to fight for policy changes yet.
But Trump keeps acting like a perpetrator rather than a victim. He wants to use the shutdown to fire more federal workers. He’s trolling Democratic leaders in insulting ways. He’s illegally using government websites and even out-of-office messages to make his political points.
Democrats, meanwhile, have a pretty good ask: Subsidies for ObamaCare healthcare policies are ending, and they want to get them re-funded. So they’re fighting to keep healthcare costs down for millions of Americans, including many Trump voters.
and Gaza
Trump put forward a peace proposal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which Hamas gave qualified agreement to. Trump pounced on this as a win, making it hard for Netanyahu to back out.
I’m skeptical, though The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit is less so: She considers it possible that the first step — release of Hamas’ remaining hostages in exchange for a ceasefire and release of about 2000 of Israel’s Palestinian prisoners — may go forward.
Speculation about Trump’s mental health has been ramping up lately for a number of reasons. His 70-minute ramble to the generals (see the featured post) was more muddled than usual, and he seemed tired. Governor Pritzker has raised the possibility that Trump’s bizarre posts about Portland and Chicago are demented. A judge Trump appointed himself said that his claims were “untethered to the facts“.
And why would Google need to put its thumb on the scale?
Henry Kissinger once lampooned Argentina’s strategic significance by calling it “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica”. Argentina’s economy (the 23rd largest in the world, just behind Belgium) is also not particularly important. But the Trump administration is willing to risk $20 billion of taxpayer money to shore up Argentina just before a major election.
Why? The current president Javier Milei, is a Trump flatterer and a mini-Trump himself. And like Trump, he is very unpopular.
Milei earned many admirers on the right for undertaking a blitz of free-market reforms. Those included slashing government subsidies and regulations, in addition to thinning public sector ranks by 50,000 employees. In return, Trump has referred to Milei as his “favorite president” and offered an endorsement for his re-election.
Also, some well-connected hedge funds have interests in Argentina.
“Donald Trump gets a two-fer here,” [Senator Elizabeth] Warren said. “He gets to bail out his political ally in Argentina, who is very unpopular and in big trouble, and his treasury secretary apparently gets to help his hedge fund buddies.”
Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittifciation” to explain what has happened to all major internet platforms and services, such as Facebook and Twitter: They draw an audience by providing a convenient service, but then become profitable by abusing that audience after it gets locked in.
In this Guardian article, Doctorow explains in detail the enshittifcation of Amazon, which ensnared not just consumers, but the merchants who provide the products Amazon sells. He explains why the market itself will never fix Amazon, and how it has become impervious to individual action. Only regulation can solve the problem.
The path to a better Amazon doesn’t lie through consumer activism, or appeals to the its conscience. … Systemic problems have systemic solutions, not individual ones. You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly.
and let’s close with something festive
If you’re not finding a lot to dance about these days, maybe you should look at this collection of the 20 greatest dance routines.
You might think that during a government shutdown, the shutdown itself would be the week’s most important story. But that’s not how I see the news this week. There is not actually that much to say about the shutdown: It’s happening. The real pain it will cause is mostly in the future. It looks like it might drag on a long time, because there’s no obvious compromise and Trump does not seem to be interested in compromise. For Trump to compromise would break his authoritarian narrative: that resistance to him is futile and will be punished.
But two other stories deserve more immediate attention: Trump and Hegseth’s bizarre speeches to an unprecedented gathering of America’s top military leaders, and the Trump regime’s continuing military attacks on Democratic-leaning cities for increasingly specious reasons. I’ll try to get a featured article on the speeches out before 10 EDT and the Chicago/Portland article out shortly thereafter.
That leaves the weekly summary to cover the shutdown, the Gaza peace proposal, the Argentina bailout, and a variety of other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The assault accelerated, with violations of free speech, using the Justice Department to persecute enemies, and threats against the city of Portland.
Climate change. So much else happened in these three weeks, I could barely notice anything about the climate.
Ukraine.Trump apparently did an about-face on this war, suddenly appearing to support Ukraine. Personally, I don’t know why anybody pays attention to what he says, since it so seldom leads to action. Currently, Trump is threatening major new sanctions on Russia, but only after Europe completely stops buying Russian oil. There will always be something somebody else has to do first, because Trump is incapable of standing up to Putin.
The new fiscal year starts Wednesday, and there’s still no funding to keep the government open. The concessions Democrats are holding out for should be popular, but Trump seems to think a shutdown works to his advantage. So I think we’ll just have to have one and see who’s right.
I think we’re about to find out what all those people do.
and ICE
Wednesday, a rooftop gunman later identified as Joshua Jahn fired down on an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees and wounding another before killing himself. No ICE agents were harmed. The killed appear not to have been targeted directly, but were just in the line of fire as he raked the building with bullets.
Official speculation says that Jahn intended to attack ICE agents, though independent blogger Ken Klippenstein talked to Jahn’s friends and described a more complex set of motives.
Both Jahn and Charlie Kirk’s killer exemplify how different most shooters are from the rest of us. Most of us have murderous fantasies at one time or another, so we imagine that actual murderers are like us, but with less self-control. I don’t think that’s true. Look inside the mind of a sniper and you’ll usually find a lot of weird stuff that has no parallel in your own mind. John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan to impress a movie star he was obsessed with; I can’t find any motive like that in my own mind.
Trump regime spokespeople are trying to use the shooting to gain sympathy for ICE and exempt them from criticism. And while I’ll grant that no one deserves to be shot at for doing their job, ICE itself does not deserve your sympathy and should be getting even more criticism.
Check out this video from New York, where an ICE agent physically attacks a woman who had been pleading with him for information about her husband, “who had been abducted by masked ICE agents who did not identify themselves, did not present a warrant, did not give any lawful grounds for his detention.” (To their credit, ICE removed the agent from duty and put out a statement saying that his actions were “unacceptable”. But I am left to wonder how many similar incidents pass without notice because no one turns them into viral videos.)
A Leominster family who has lived in the United States for more than 20 years said federal immigration agents held their 5-year-old daughter, who is a US-citizen and autistic, in custody outside their home in an effort to pressure the parents to turn themselves over to agents.
The family gave the Globe videos of the girl standing in the driveway, surrounded by armed agents. When the father told them not to touch her, one agent taunted back: “You’re more than welcome to come pick her up.”
Ian Roberts is the superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district. (Des Moines), and the first person of color to hold that position. Or at least he was until Friday morning when ICE arrested him. As of this weekend, he was in a county jail. Trump got elected pledging to round up violent criminals, but that’s not at all what he’s doing.
Here’s what I say to those who accuse liberals of “demonizing” ICE: It’s not demonization if your behavior is genuinely demonic.
A Reuters article notes that federal drug prosecutions are way down. That’s a hidden cost of shifting law-enforcement resources to mass deportation. I also wonder about white-collar crime, which Trump has no interest in stopping. This ought to be a golden age for would-be Bernie Madoffs.
There’s an ICE processing center in Burlington, MA, a few miles from where I live. Every Wednesday from 11 am to 1 pm, hundreds of people show up to protest. This week I went for the first time.
and corruption
Recent weeks have exposed corrupt acts of both omission and commission. The so-called Department of “Justice” has been using its shield to protect the guilty and its sword to attack the innocent.
In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.
The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.
Trump has gotten impatient with DoJ apparently dragging its feet about indicting and convicting his political enemies. Rather than call AG Pam Bondi on the phone, he posted to Truth Social:
Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” … We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!
[It’s worth pointing out that the only one “guilty as hell” is Trump himself. On the merits, both impeachments should have resulted in conviction and removal. With the cooperation of the Supreme Court and a puppet district judge, Trump avoided trial on the most serious indictments. The only time a jury heard the evidence against him, he was convicted on all counts.]
For the most part, DoJ prosecutors have been trying to placate Trump without doing too much injury to their personal integrity. The result has been what LawFare’s Benjamin Wittes calls “ghost investigations“: DoJ announces that it is investigating Trump’s enemies, allowing Fox News to tease its viewers with the anticipation of lurid show trials. But since these people have done nothing wrong other than antagonize Dear Leader, the investigations lead to “all talk, no action”, just as Trump said.
Announcing such investigations is an ethical violation in itself — DoJ should shut up until it has an indictment to file in court — but people unwilling to compromise themselves at least that far don’t survive in the Trump regime.
The most urgent enemy for Trump to indict was James Comey, because the statute of limitations was about to run out on his 2020 testimony to Congress. That effort at persecution had been running into roadblocks, mainly because professional prosecutors did not want to violate their integrity or ruin their reputation by pushing a phony indictment for political purposes.
To start with, Trump-appointed US Attorney Erik Siebert refused to try to indict Comey, believing there was no case. So Trump pushed him out and replaced him with his former personal lawyer (who has never prosecuted a case before) Lindsey Halligan. Halligan was met with a memo from her prosecutors more-or-less repeating that point.
It is unclear whether any career lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia agreed with the decision to seek charges against Comey or will be willing to help conduct the day-to-day work of the prosecution.
One of the points Halligan will have to defend against is malicious prosecution, for which a judge could throw the case out. To guard against that, you would expect the indictment itself to make a strong case, but the Comey indictment does not: It is a mere page-and-a-half, and just lists the charges without giving a hint as to why anybody should credit those charges. Reportedly, the grand jury refused to support a third count, and passed the other two with a bare 14-9 majority. That doesn’t speak well for Halligan’s ability to get a unanimous beyond-reasonable-doubt judgment from a trial jury.
But that seems to be beside the point: Halligan needs to please Trump, and Trump wants an indictment. So he got one.
and Portland
The latest American city Trump has chosen to invade for no legitimate reason is Portland.
At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.
Residents of Portland have no idea what he’s talking about. The city is not “War ravaged”. There have been a few small protests outside ICE offices (probably like the one I participated in Wednesday in Massachusetts), but they are not “under siege from attack by Antifa”.
200 troops from the Oregon National Guard have been deployed over the objection of their usual commander, Governor Tina Kotek. Oregon and Portland have come together to file a lawsuit seeking to stop the deployment.
“When the president and I spoke yesterday, I told him in plain language that there is no insurrection or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland or any other city in our state,” Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek said in a news release Sunday. “Despite this — and all evidence to the contrary — he has chosen to disregard Oregonians’ safety and ability to govern ourselves. This is not necessary. And it is unlawful. And it will make Oregonians less safe.”
and autism
The great thing about being a crank is that you’re never wrong. Any bit of evidence that supports your view is reliable, while anything pointing the other way is fake. So as soon as Trump appointed well-known crank RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, you had to know what was coming: an announcement that a simple cause for rising numbers of autism diagnoses has been found, and that it has something to do with either a vaccine or a drug people take.
We got that predictable announcement Monday. Trump and RFK appeared together to announce that autism is caused by taking Tylenol late in pregnancy.
Trump kicked the meeting off by expressing the classic crank fantasy: I know way more than the experts and I always have.
It’s probably 20 years ago, in New York. I was a developer, as you probably heard, and I always had very strong feelings about autism and how it happened and where it came from. … It’s turning out that we understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it.
In a word: no. The best reference I found on this topic was in Stat News. The gist is that there is a (small) correlation between women taking Tylenol during pregnancy and autistic children. But this has been studied for years and nobody has found any causation.
[W]hat researchers debate is whether Tylenol might cause autism, or whether Tylenol is simply more often used by people who experience certain conditions during pregnancy, such as infections or migraines, which might also be linked to autism. This is a key problem in science. Ice cream consumption increases in the summer, as do sunburns and shark attacks. But ice cream does not cause sunburns or shark attacks — they all just happen more often during the summer.
Nothing in the science justifies Trump’s unequivocal statement: “So taking Tylenol is not good. All right. I’ll say it. It’s not good.”
And even if the entire correlation were due to Tylenol causing autism, it’s way too small to explain the increase in autism diagnoses.
Oh, and there was a bunch of nonsense: Cuba and the Amish do indeed have autism, among other bits of misinformation.
The other headline from the announcement was an “exciting new therapy” for autism: leucovorin. This also is not new. There are some very small studies that show that leucovorin might help somewhat. The normal course of research would be to commission larger studies and see if the small-study result can be replicated — not to announce an “exciting new therapy”.
Finally, even though what they were presenting had nothing to do with vaccines, Trump just couldn’t couldn’t stop himself from babbling about them.
The other thing that I can tell you that I’ll say that they will maybe say at a little bit later date. But I think when you go for the shot, you do it over a five-time period, take it over five times or four times, but you take it in smaller doses and you spread it out over a period of years. And they pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it’s a disgrace. I don’t see it. I think it’s very bad. They’re pumping — it looks like they’re pumping into a horse. You have a little child, a little fragile child and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess, 80 different blends and they pump it in. So ideally, a woman won’t take Tylenol. And on the vaccines, it would be good instead of one visit where they pump the baby, load it up with stuff, you’ll do it over a period of four times or five times. I mean, I’ve been so into this issue for so many years just because I couldn’t understand how a thing like this could happen and you know it’s artificially induced. It’s not like something that — when you go from all of those, you know, healthy babies to a point where I don’t even know structurally if a country can afford it and that’s the least of the problems. To have families destroyed over this is just so, so terrible. I also — and we’ve already done this. We want no mercury in the vaccine. We want no aluminum in the vaccine. The MMR, I think should be taken separately. This is based on what I feel. The mumps, measles and the three should be taken separately. And it seems to be that when you mix them, there could be a problem. So there’s no downside in taking them separately. In fact, they think it’s better.
A little over a week ago, I was flying back from a vacation in the Azores. (America and the Trump regime seemed very far away, thank you for asking.) My girl friend was sitting next to a doctor from Germany whose wife has a research job in the Boston area. The Azores seemed like a central point for the two to meet for a vacation, but they had to cut the vacation short due to an emergency.
The emergency had nothing to do with medical care, either needing it or needing to provide it. It had nothing to do with houses or kids or parents or any of the other emergencies we typically think of when we think of cutting short a foreign vacation. No, this was a political emergency. Trump has just signed an executive order saying:
entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000
That new policy would take effect at midnight on September 21. Our plane was landing around 8 p.m. on the 20th. Our seatmate’s wife had one of those 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) (i.e. H1-B) visas, and was panicked that she’d owe $100K if she didn’t get back to the US before midnight.
Eventually the Trump regime clarified its order; in fact they wouldn’t have owed the money. The $100K is a one-time payment for new visas, not something H1-B holders owe every time they cross the border. But our doctor friend and his wife were not alone in his interpretation:
For a tense 24 hours, workers feared they could be locked out of the United States altogether. Tech companies and banks sent urgent memos advising employees not to leave the country. Bags were packed, tickets bought and families left behind as visa holders scrambled to beat what they believed was a looming deadline.
Video verified by NBC News showed chaos and confusion on a flight from San Francisco to Dubai after Trump’s announcement. The captain is heard citing “unprecedented” circumstances, saying, “There’s a number of passengers that do not wish to travel with us.”
Maybe your eyes glaze over when you see a bureaucratic phrase like “H1-B visa”, and maybe sometimes you even succumb to the regime’s dehumanization of H1-B holders as “immigrants” or “foreigners”. But they’re all real people. They have families, they take vacations, and sometimes they sit next to you on airplanes.
Here’s a less technical way to think about “section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b)”: When most immigrants come to America, the impetus comes from them. They are either running from an unliveable situation somewhere else, or just seeking a better life here. Many Americans are afraid that if we let in everybody who wants to come, our society will be swamped. They’ll drive down wages; we’ll lose our unifying values, and so on. So we construct all sorts of legal hurdles people have to jump before they can come and stay for anything longer than a vacation.
But occasionally the impetus to bring someone to America comes from us. They have some rare (or even unique) talent that we need, so we want those people to be able to jump the line and come here quickly, without a bunch of barriers or hurdles. That’s what the H1-B visas are for. Every year, we let in about 85K foreigners under this program. They get a three-year visa which they can extend to six years. Many use those six years to apply for a green card and stay permanently.
A variety of exemptions have stretched the numbers in recent years, to 265,777 in 2022. That might be too many. There aren’t a quarter-million Einsteins trying to get into the country every year, and one reason entry-level jobs in technology are hard to find might be that companies are bringing in cheap programmers from India and other low-wage countries.
So the justifications given for Trump’s executive order were not entirely wrong:
[A]buse of the H-1B visa program has made it even more challenging for college graduates trying to find IT jobs, allowing employers to hire foreign workers at a significant discount to American workers. … Reports also indicate that many American tech companies have laid off their qualified and highly skilled American workers and simultaneously hired thousands of H-1B workers. … American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance. This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States.
So the program is ripe for reform, and it shouldn’t be hard to build a bipartisan consensus around some simple changes. But why use a scalpel when you have a hatchet? Paul Krugman summarizes all the ways that Trump’s new rule will hurt the US economy and our standing in the world.
But I keep thinking about our seatmate. How many foreigners like him and his wife are getting the impression that the US is bad news? Getting involved with the United States or American companies means giving an unstable autocrat permission to pull your strings.
which all leads to an overwhelming question
All my life, I’ve been taught to respect the law. But what should we do when the law stops being respectable? Vassar Professor Daniel Mendiola raises this in a Guardian column “The US government is facing a crisis of legitimacy“.
Much of the blame for this lies with the Supreme Court, which decided to give Trump immunity for all official acts, whether they are legal or not. And through its shadow docket, it has repeatedly overturned injunctions that forced the Trump regime to obey the laws.
If courts can’t issue an injunction to stop the government from doing illegal things, then no matter how blatantly the government is violating people’s rights, it can keep doing it unimpeded so long as the case stays tied up in appeals – a process that often takes years. In this scenario, law exists in theory, but there are virtually no limits to what the government can do in practice.
At least four people were killed and eight others injured after a gunman opened fire at a Mormon church in Michigan and then set the building ablaze, authorities said. … In North Carolina, another 40-year-old Marine veteran who served in Iraq was the suspect in a shooting that killed three people and wounded five others less than 14 hours before the Michigan incident. … In Texas, about 12.15am on Sunday, two people died and five more were injured in a shooting at the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle casino in Eagle Pass, near the US-Mexico border, the local news outlet KSAT reported. … Meanwhile, in New Orleans, on the first block of Bourbon Street, the well-known entertainment thoroughfare, a triple shooting killed one woman, wounded two other women and injured a man, local police said. According to Guardian reporting partner WWL Louisiana, the slain woman was pronounced dead at the scene while the other three who were wounded were taken to a hospital.
Wired asked hundreds of federal employees what it was like last spring to have DOGE overlords roaming about. The gist: A lot of trivial harassment resulting in no actual savings or efficiencies. An anonymous woman from FEMA tells this story:
The women’s restroom was out of toilet paper within a week or so of us coming back to the office. I brought this up to Facilities, like, “Hey, this is kind of a sanitation and dignity issue, can you hook us up with more toilet paper?” They were like, “We’d love to, but we can’t purchase anything until they unfreeze the cards, and we don’t even know what the process is, because they have them sort of indefinitely frozen.” For five months we were instructed to bring in our own toilet paper. I literally kept two rolls at my desk. I wish I were joking.
Speaking of DOGE: We all remember hearing that DOGE shut down programs like USAID, cut a bunch of medical research grants, and fired lots of people. This was supposed to save money. But what happened to that money?
Across federal agencies, the Trump administration’s aggressive slash-and-burn approach to federal programs, grants and contracts has repeatedly challenged Congress’ power of the purse. The administration has claimed it has the discretion to redirect funds to programs aligned with Trump’s agenda — and Republican congressional leaders have largely let them do it.
The outcome: Billions in taxpayer dollars have become virtually untraceable — a level of opaqueness in government funds that’s raising questions around the legality of the administration’s actions.
Nobody is very good at predicting financial collapses, so you should always take economic doomsaying with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, one of the things pessimists look for is the possibility of a vicious cycle, where things briefly going bad (for any reason) might suddenly produce other reasons for things to go bad in a more serious way. The 2008 collapse was like that. Everything was fine as long as people kept bidding up house prices. But as soon as the housing boom faltered, banks started failing, causing more people to need to sell their houses.
The Guardian’s Larry Elliott has identified such a potential cycle. He starts out by noting the oddity of the current moment: Stock markets are setting records at a time when the underlying economy doesn’t look so good; growth stalling, inflation and unemployment both creeping up, and so on. If you’re in the bottom half of the economy, you’re probably worried about your future. But at the same time, things look pretty good for the wealthy.
The top 10% of earners account for almost half of consumer spending – the highest level since the late 1980s.
So if something made the well-to-do uneasy enough to cut back, they could start a recession all by themselves. What might make them do that? A drop in the stock market.
So we’re in a situation where some shock — say, an unexpected corporate bankruptcy or something — could cause a short-term drop in the markets, which would then start a recession, which would then lead to a bigger drop.
and let’s close with something out of this world
NASA and the European Space Agency regularly put videos on YouTube based on what they’re seeing through they Hubble Space Telescope. HubbleCast is up to its 133rd episode. Here’s Episode 1 to get you started.
Collections of quotes that paint Kirk as a hate-monger promoting bigotry of all sorts: racism, sexism, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQ, and so on.
Neither struck me as the whole story, so I challenged myself to form an independent opinion about Kirk. I listened to his wife’s eulogy for him, I watched most of his conversation with Gavin Newsom, I read as much of his book The MAGA Doctrine as Amazon would show me for free, and I looked for anybody else who had a view of him deeper than a partisan knee-jerk.
This is where I’ve gotten to. Unsurprisingly, I wind up mostly on the cynical side.
In Erika Kirk’s speech, I mainly heard standard Christian evangelism not all that different from what Billy Graham was saying half a century ago: Americans are in a spiritual crisis that can only be solved by turning their lives over to Jesus and living according to traditional gender roles that I don’t recall Jesus ever advocating. Kirk’s brand of Christianity was mostly Christian Nationalism, which I (and many others) believe is a perversion of Jesus’ message.
(For those of you without a Christian education, Jesus had a lot to say about feeding the poor, healing the sick, and living your life according to compassion rather than rules. The gospels paint his opponents the Pharisees as the strict rule-followers. A few years ago, I wrote a post about where I think Christianity went wrong. Later I turned it into a sermon at a Unitarian Universalist church. The sermon is a little better, in my opinion.)
Kirk and Newsom talked amicably (to the point that I was getting angry with Newsom for not challenging some very questionable assertions). Here, the evangelism played a very small role: This was two political operators comparing notes. Still, I heard Kirk’s voice and heard him speak for himself; we should all do that before we pass judgment on people.
The MAGA Doctrine is Kirk’s 2020 take on Trumpism, though I’ve seen no sign that he ever revised his the worshipful view it presents. His political worldview, to me, feels based in resentment: Both political parties are presented as uncaring, and Trump is the revenge of the neglected voter. There is a whiff of traditional conservative rhetoric: small government, individual freedom, and so on. But it’s hard to take seriously given that Kirk stuck by Trump even as Trump was expanding government power and concentrating it in an autocratic presidency. As with so many conservatives, Kirk’s idea of “freedom” was freedom for people like himself, not freedom for everybody.
One thing Kirk was very good at — and this is where all those objectionable quotes come from — was trolling people like me. He played the game of making people angry, then painting himself as the victim of that anger. (And ultimately, he did become the victim of someone who felt trolled. “I had enough of his hatred,” the accused shooter texted to a friend.)
Another thing Kirk was good at was getting funding from the very rich. Erika made a point of how little he had when he started his crusade to win young Americans for Christ (and later Trump), but Turning Point has never lacked for funding. Charlie got his first $50K at age 20 from the multimillionaire Dunn family. He soon attracted the attention of billionaire Foster Friess, and he was on his way. The Dunns eventually contributed millions. The Bradley Impact Fund gave TPUSA $8 million in 2023, and millions more came from a fund connected to Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus.
The ValueWalk website recently estimated Kirk’s net worth at $12 million, including a $4.5 million mansion in Scottsdale.
People sometimes wonder why there’s no Charlie Kirk of the Left. Well, money is one big reason: It’s hard to picture an 20-year-old liberal or socialist running into somebody at a conference and walking away with the funding to start a national organization, much less get rich in the process.
The Voice of Reason blog had an even more cynical take on Kirk’s entrepreneurial nature, painting him as a front for older, richer men.
Here is what really happened. In 2012, a 72-year-old Tea Party activist named Bill Montgomery heard Kirk give a talk at a small local event. Montgomery took one look at this kid with ambition in his eyes and told him to skip college and start an organization. Within weeks, Turning Point USA was born. Montgomery wasn’t just a mentor. He was the co-founder, treasurer, and strategist. In plain English: Kirk didn’t invent Turning Point USA. He was recruited into it by an older political operative who saw in him a useful mouthpiece.
Then came the money. Kirk didn’t scrape together pennies from bake sales. He stalked the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012 memorizing donor faces. That’s how he buttonholed multimillionaire Foster Friess, pitched him, and walked away with a five-figure check. Add in Bruce Rauner, the future governor of Illinois, and the DeVos family, and suddenly this “teenage entrepreneur” had more capital than most actual start-ups. By 2016, Turning Point’s budget had ballooned from $50,000 to over $5 million. That doesn’t happen because of hustle. That happens because deep-pocketed billionaires decide you are worth buying.
Amanda Marcotte doubts that Erika can keep TPUSA rolling, because so much of Charlie’s following was based on misogyny.
Charlie Kirk was an aspirational figure for his male audience. They wished they could go on campuses and condescend to cute girls, but they knew — they continue to know — that wouldn’t go well for them. They’d get ignored, mocked or worse, have campus security called on them. Charlie Kirk, though, had the charisma, money and organization to tilt the field so that he “won” every encounter — even though the kids that approached him usually had better arguments. He offered a fantasy of male domination. His audience will never accept a woman in this fake “alpha male” role.
For the first time, Trump used autocratic power in a way that the public couldn’t ignore, and a popular pushback forced a big corporation to stand up to him. Is that an anomaly or the start of a turn-around?
We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
Four things are worth noting:
Kirk’s assassin was brought up in a conservative family, but later developments showed that Kimmel was wrong to imply that he was MAGA himself.
Kimmel was right that MAGA pundits did everything they could to score political points from the assassination.
Kimmel did not insult Kirk, or in any way make light of his assassination.
But he did make fun of Trump’s response to the assassination. He played a clip of Trump being asked about Kirk and then seguing to the new White House ballroom he wants to build. “That’s not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend,” Kimmel said. “This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, the Trump-appointed chairman said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Hours later, a spokesperson for Disney’s ABC confirmed to PEOPLE that Jimmy Kimmel Live! would be put on an indefinite hiatus.
Be sure to watch to the end of the 28-minute clip so you can see Robert De Niro play the new head of the FCC. Nobody can deliver a mafioso threat like De Niro, who clarified the new meaning of “free speech”.
“You want to say something nice about the president’s beautiful thick yellow hair and how he can do his make-up better than any broad, that’s free,” De Niro said. “But if you want to do a joke like, ‘He’s so fat he needs two seats on the Epstein jet’, that’s going to cost you.” The actor struggled to suppress a smile.
Kimmel asked: “For clarity, because it’s a pretty good joke, how much would that one cost me?”
“A couple of fingers, maybe a tooth,” came the reply.
I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.
His post should settle a few previously contentious points:
Trump was deeply involved in Kimmel’s suspension. Why else would ABC have told the White House that the show was cancelled? All the MAGA attempts to attribute the suspension to bad ratings or other legitimate causes were bogus.
Trump reiterated his threats of censorship. Kimmel’s criticism of Trump “puts the Network in jeopardy”. Nice network you got there; be a shame if something happened to it.
In Trump’s mind, the issue is criticism of him, and has nothing to do with Charlie Kirk. That was already apparent from Trump’s tweet of September 17, shortly after Kimmel was taken off the air: “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” Late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers didn’t have a Kirk problem, they’re just Trump critics.
Trump has not won any of his media lawsuits in court. Instead, he has used his government power to extort settlements out of parent companies that need favors. (These settlements are essentially bribes, as Stephen Colbert was cancelled for pointing out.) If ABC-owner Disney stands firm, Trump’s proposed lawsuit will fail.
And yet, that howl has not produced any action so far. David Frum and Paul Krugman each suggest that Trump is in a race against time: His bid for authoritarian power is racing against his plunging popularity. At some point, he will have so much autocratic power that politics barely matters any more, but he’s not there yet. And if his targets begin to believe they can stand up to him and win, while his Republican allies begin to worry that he will drag them down with him, that autocratic creep might stop or even reverse.
Krugman summarizes the situation:
It’s clear that if Trump were subject to normal political constraints, obliged to follow the rule of law and accept election results, he would already be a political lame duck. His future influence and those of his minions would be greatly reduced by his unpopularity. But at this juncture he is a quasi-autocrat. He is the leader of a party that accommodates his every whim, backed by a corrupt Supreme Court prepared to validate whatever he does, no matter how clearly it violates the law. As a result, Trump has been able to use the vast power of the federal government to deliver punishments and rewards in a completely unprecedented way. … This has created a climate of intimidation, with many institutions preemptively capitulating to Trump’s demands as if he already had total power.
… It’s important to understand that Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Behind closed doors, business leaders bemoan the destruction that Trump is wreaking on the economy. But they capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power — which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate.
If this smoke-and-mirrors juggernaut starts to falter, the perception of inevitability will collapse and Trump’s autocracy putsch may very well fall apart.
Jay Kuo lists a number of areas in which Trump’s autocratic push is meeting resistance. But a key source of Kuo’s optimism is that there is a limit to how far the Supreme Court will let Trump go. So far, they have largely delayed ruling on the legality of his actions while allowing those actions to continue temporarily. One big question still to be resolved is which way they will ultimately go: Will they defend the Constitution, or will they usher in the new fascist state?
In large part that may depend on how Trump’s self-fulfilling prophecy plays out in John Roberts’ mind.
I took the last two Mondays off (and had a very restful trip to the Azores). But it looks like a lot of things happened while I was gone. This week I’ll try to catch up.
Shortly after my last blog posts, Charlie Kirk was murdered. Then Jimmy Kimmel was canceled. Then (in some order) a sniper shot at an ICE facility in Dallas, we found out about Tom Homan’s $50K bribe, Jim Comey got indicted, Trump and RFK Jr. declared definitively (and without any scientific evidence) that Tylenol causes autism, Trump made a bonkers speech to the UN, Kimmel came back, Trump announced an invasion of Portland, a guy sitting in my airplane aisle had a personal story to tell about the H1-B visa fiasco, all our generals and admirals have been called to a meeting in Virginia tomorrow, and I probably forgot something.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to take a vacation.
The short version of the last few weeks is that Trump’s bid for dictatorial power seems to be coming to a head. There’s a race against time to seize as much power as he can as his popularity plunges.
Anyway, I have choices to make about which stories to spin off into their own posts. I’m going to write about Kirk simply because much of what I read about him isn’t that good. He wasn’t a saint and he was more than just a collection of bigoted quotes. The Kimmel saga will get its own post, because it raises the question of a turning point. I’m not sure yet what else.
Anyway, the Kimmel post will come out first, maybe around 10. We’ll see what happens from there.
The Weekly Sift 