I honestly did not read most of this article, but I wanted to draw your attention to some facts about the recent presidential election that you might find surprising:
While Mr. Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries, he garnered just 50.1 percent nationally, according to the latest tabulation by The Times, just 1.8 percentage points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris. When the slow-counting blue giant of California finally finishes tallying its votes, that margin is likely to shrink a bit more. The Cook Report already calculates that his percentage has fallen below 50 percent, meaning he did not win a majority.
Wherever it eventually falls, Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in the national popular vote will be one of the smallest in history. Since 1888, only two other presidents who won both the Electoral College and the popular vote had smaller margins of victory: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. (Both Mr. Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000 won the Electoral College, and therefore the presidency, without winning the popular vote.)
Mr. Trump can boast that he increased his margin in the Electoral College, winning 312 votes this year to the 306 he garnered eight years ago. But according to nearly complete totals, he secured his most recent victory by just a cumulative 237,000 votes in three states that, had they gone the other way, would have meant victory for Ms. Harris.
It’s fine for Trump to crow about his massive election win, but everyone else should realize how historically small his victory actually was. And how he might not have won at all if not for the pressure the Republicans have put on our systems of voting over the past decades (all manner of voter suppression), the billionaires propping up his campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars when he couldn’t keep pace with his opponent in non-PAC fundraising, and the will of post-pandemic voters worldwide who wanted the incumbents out no matter what. Mandate schmandate.
Note: You wouldn’t even need all of those “cumulative 237,000 votes” to go the other way — all you’d need is half + 1. So we’re talking about ~118,500 voters out of ~155 million. That’s razor thin.
The NY Times has had a difficult time covering the 2024 election in a clear, responsible manner. But I wanted to highlight this short opinion piece from the paper’s editorial board, which I’m reproducing here in its entirety:
What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that is often overlooked and taken for granted. Only 110 words in that paragraph but it contains 27 links to other NYT opinion pieces published over the last several months that expand on each linked statement or argument. If you were inclined to follow these links, you could spend hours reading about how unfit Trump is for office.
A simple list of headlines would have done the same basic job, but by presenting it this way, the Times editorial board is simultaneously able to deliver a strong opinion; each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis. Lies, threat, corruption, cruel, autocrats — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! Fucking! Receipts!
How the links are deployed is an integral part of how the piece is read; it’s a style of writing that is native to the web, pioneered by sites like Suck in the mid-90s. It looks so simple, but IMO, this is top-notch, subtle information design.
This is a great piece by Jamelle Bouie: Donald Trump Is Done With Checks and Balances. The first half is a short lesson on how our present Constitution came to be, which might differ slightly from the version you learned in school:
It is important to remember that the Constitution was neither written nor ratified with democracy in mind. Just the opposite: It was written to restrain — and contain — the democratic impulses of Americans shaped in the hothouse of revolutionary fervor.
“Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states,” the historian Terry Bouton writes in “Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.”
The second part of the piece plainly and succinctly lays out the stakes of a second Trump presidency (emphasis mine):
America got lucky. It won’t get lucky again. Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies. In doing so, he will erode the democratic assumptions that undergird our current constitutional order. And he will have the total loyalty of a Republican Party that itself is twisting and abusing the counter-majoritarian features of the American system to undermine and unravel democracy in the states it controls.
We don’t, in 2024, hear much talk of guardrails anymore. And for good reason. The guardrails failed. Every single one of them. The Republican Party failed to police its own boundaries, welcoming Trump when it should have done everything it could to expel him. The impeachment process, designed to remove a rogue president, was short-circuited, unable to work in a world of rigid partisan loyalty. The criminal legal system tried to hold Trump accountable, but this was slow-walked and sabotaged by sympathetic judges (and justices) appointed by Trump or committed to the Republican Party.
When the states tried to take matters into their own hands, citing the clear text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court stepped in to rewrite the amendment, turning a self-executing prohibition on insurrectionists in office into a mechanism that required a congressional vote those justices knew would never come.
Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid, too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media — too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.
I love Patel’s use of the collective action problem to frame his argument. From earlier in the piece:
Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.
I also thought this was a really interesting observation regarding the challenge facing Democrats (of fitting moderate conservatives, the far-left, and everyone else who isn’t in favor of authoritarianism under the same tent):
Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.
An attempt to rapidly deport twelve million people will also change everyone else. As Trump has said, such an action will have to bring in law enforcement at all levels. Such a huge mission will effectively redefine the purpose of law enforcement: the principle is no longer to make all people feel safe, but to make some people unsafe. And of course the diversion of law enforcement resources to deportation means that crimes will not be investigated or prosecuted. So some people will be radically less safe, but everyone regardless of status will in fact be less safe.
Such an enormous deportation will requires an army of informers. People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples. Denunciation then becomes a culture. If you are Latino, expect to be denounced at some point, and expect special attention from a government that will demand your help to find people who are not documented. This is especially true if you are a local civic or business leader. You will be expected to collaborate in the deportation effort: if you do, you will be harming others; if you do not, you risk being seen as disloyal yourself. This painful choice can be avoided not at a later point but only now, by voting against mass deportations.
The Trump campaign is telling us straight out that this is their plan — they are not hiding it! at all! — and historians are letting us know what has happened in similar situations in the past and it’s just not all that confusing or complicated to understand. Even if they try and don’t succeed, it’s going to be absolutely brutal. Those are the stakes.
Separated is the newest documentary film from Errol Morris. Based on Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, the film probes the inhumane family separation and immigration policies of the Trump administration. From a review in The Guardian:
The Trump administration’s southern border policy began with the dream of a wall in the desert and ended with the nightmare of family separation: children torn from their parents and loaded en masse into wire-mesh cages. It was inhumane treatment, which was precisely the point. The White House’s intention was to use terror as a deterrent and effectively write every parent’s worst fear into law. “When you have that policy, people don’t come,” Donald Trump said blithely. “I know it sounds harsh, but we have to save our country.”
Errol Morris’s forensic, procedural documentary walks us through the bureaucratic backrooms to show how the policy was hatched and implemented. It explains how its principal authors — Trump adviser Stephen Miller and attorney general Jeff Sessions — junked the pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) in favour of a bold new tactic of forced separation and mass imprisonment. If Separated lacks the rueful exuberance that typifies much of Morris’s early work (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, even last year’s John le Carré film), that is entirely understandable. The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.
“Harm to children was part of the point,” says Jonathan White, a committed public servant who saw his department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, hijacked by a blatantly inhumane strategy that the Trump administration implemented for its deterrent potential. “They believed it would terrify families into not coming.” White isn’t exactly a whistleblower, although he comes across as no less courageous in describing a dictated-from-the-top family separation scheme for which he had a front-row seat.
And here’s an interview with Morris & Soboroff about the film:
For his second term, Trump and his team are planning a blockbuster sequel to these inhumane crimes entirely in the open: deporting up to 20 million people (undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and political opponents) with a minimum of due process, which will require a massive increase in the scale of the police state and concentration camps. That’s 6% of the US population. We don’t know if they will succeed but they will try. Those are the stakes.
These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.
They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new — in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” — but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.
It’s really disheartening and maddening to witness how the press has failed to meet this important moment in history.
See also Jamelle Bouie’s NY Times piece this morning, straining against the normalizing currents at his own publication to actually call out Trump’s “incoherence” and “gibberish” and parse out what he’s actually trying to tell us about his plans for a second term:
Trump, in his usual, deranged way, is elaborating on one of the key promises of his campaign: retribution against his political enemies. Elect Trump in November, and he will try to use the power of the federal government to threaten, harass and even arrest his opponents. If his promise to deport more than 20 million people from the United State is his policy for rooting out supposedly “foreign” enemies in the body politic, then this promise to prosecute his opponents is his corresponding plan to handle the nation’s domestic foes, as he sees them. Or, as he said last year in New Hampshire, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Trump’s plan to launch a massive deportation project nationwide — the first plank in the platform approved at his party’s convention — draws on the same flawed historical rationales and pseudoscience that built support for concentration camps worldwide in the 20th century. Early architects of these camps veiled their efforts in scientific terms while using terror and punishment to seize more power.
For example, Trump has claimed repeatedly that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. “Blood poisoning” is a medical condition; saying that foreigners are poisoning a nation’s blood is simply a slur. But perverting scientific or medical language to violate human rights and permit atrocities comes from a familiar playbook.
Again, this stuff is all right out in the open — no reading between the lines required.
I can’t decide which of the plans in these three excerpts is most terrifying:
Stephen Miller, at America First Legal, has been devising plans to enact a nationwide crackdown on immigration, just as he had hoped to carry out on a vast scale in the first Trump term. The impediment then was operational: a lack of personnel to make arrests, a shortage of space to detain people, resistance from Democratic officials at the state and local levels. Miller has since vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to the Times. The President would have to deputize federal troops to carry out the job, because there wouldn’t be enough agents at the Department of Homeland Security to do it. The government would need to build large internment camps, and, in the event that Congress refused to appropriate the money required, the President would have to divert funds from the military.
The person close to C.P.I. considered himself a denizen of the far-right wing of the Republican Party, yet some of the ideas under discussion among those working on Project 2025 genuinely scared him. One of them was what he described to me as “all this talk, still, about bombing Mexico and taking military action in Mexico.” This had apparently come up before, during the first Trump term, in conversations about curbing the country’s drug cartels. The President had been mollified but never dissuaded. According to Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, Trump once asked, “How would we do if we went to war with Mexico?”
Those close to Trump are also anticipating large protests if he wins in November. His first term was essentially bookended by demonstrations, from the Women’s March and rallies against the Muslim ban to the mass movement that took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, in the summer of 2020. Jeffrey Clark and others have been working on plans to impose a version of the Insurrection Act that would allow the President to dispatch troops to serve as a national police force. Invoking the act would allow Trump to arrest protesters, the person told me. Trump came close to doing this in the final months of his term, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, but he was blocked by his Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
You don’t even need to be a scholar of authoritarianism to recognize where this is going — it’s not like they are being secretiveabout it.
One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the constitution than to Trump — a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he thought he would remain in office.
Trump has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning life-saving gender affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.
Project 2025 also calls for eliminating “woke propaganda” from all laws and federal regulations — including the terms “sexual orientation”, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, “gender equality”, and “reproductive rights”.
Other items in the Project 2025 blueprint are precisely what Trump has called for on the campaign trail, including mass arrests and deportations of undocumented people in the United States, ending many worker protections, dropping prosecutions of far-right militias like the Proud Boys, and giving additional tax cuts to big corporations and the rich.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that climate change is a “hoax”. Project 2025 calls for expanding oil drilling in the United States, shrinking the geographic footprint of national monuments, terminating clean energy incentives, and ending fossil fuel regulations.
Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like, and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.
The 900-page document was prepared by Heritage Foundation, whose president stated recently on a right-wing podcast that “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”. (This is the same logic used by abusers: “Why did you make me do that to you?”)
This all sounds sort of alarmist until you actually read what’s written in the document, like this passage on abortions:
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.
It’s like that old bit of advice: “When people show you who they are, believe them”. Conservatives are literally telling us their plans for exacting a fascist regime under Trump…we should believe them.
The consequences of Schedule F could be catastrophic for the government. As Jacqueline Simon, the policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, put it: “There will be a massive exodus of competence.”
“When you fire everyone who knows what they’re doing and only hire people who will say yes to the rich guy in charge, that’s not a recipe for good government,” Oliver added. “It’s a recipe for the Titan submersible.”
With a civil service full of loyalty appointees, Trump wouldn’t need Congress to pass a national ban on abortion drugs, for example, when his head of the Food and Drug Administration could just rule them “unsafe” — a plan specifically outlined in Project 2025.
Education Week simply states one of Project 2025’s goals: “The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers more visibility into what policy agenda a future Trump administration might pursue. It says policies that support LGBTQ+ rights, subsidize “single-motherhood” and penalize marriage should be repealed because subjective notions of “gender identity” threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”
It also proposes increasing surveillance of abortion and maternal mortality reporting in the states, compelling the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of “chemical abortion drugs” and protecting “religious and moral” objections for employers who decline contraception coverage for employees. One of the groups that partners with Project 2025, Turning Point USA, is among conservative influencers that health professionals have criticized for targeting young women with misleading health concerns about hormonal birth control. Another priority is defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides reproductive health care to low-income women.
Purveyors of pornography, Roberts writes, “are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
It should seem odd that media calls to step down were not first directed to Trump. If we are calling for Biden to step aside because someone must stop Trump from bringing down the republic, then surely it would have made more sense to first call for Trump to step aside? (The Philadelphia Inquirer did). I know the counter-arguments: his people wouldn’t have cared, and he wouldn’t have listened. The first misses an important point. There are quite a few Americans who have not made up their minds. The second amounts to obeying in advance. If you accept that a fascist is beyond your reach, you have normalized your submission.
1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
From Heather Cox Richardson, writing on the night of the debate, a reminder of just how bad Trump’s performance was, a shambolic spectacle that was met with shrugs because that’s what we expect of him:
In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list.
Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned — both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes — this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale — and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.
Listen, we talking about practice. Not a game, not a game, not a game. We talking about practice. Not a game, not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it’s my last. Not the game. We talking about practice, man.
While he might be fine at blustering his way through debates (practice), Trump, famously, was bad at being president and actually didn’t like the job (the game). Like, we don’t have to imagine how Trump would perform as president because he did the job, poorly & ruinously, for four years. Biden has logged 3.5 years as president and has been very productive on behalf of the American people. We can directly compare them! And their teams! Politics & governance is a team sport, and Trump’s team is a flaming dumpster fire. So let’s stop talking about practice (and the media’s horse race coverage) and start focusing on the game.
I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race — providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.
They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.
I’ve been watching this play out over the last few weeks and whatever the media (especially the NY Times) and pundits are doing here is much more alarming to me than Biden’s poor debate performance. Especially considering:
Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.
The Trump administration’s ever-broadening palette of ethics violations caused Americans to realize, perhaps for the first time on a national scale, that truly there are few if any laws against some of the most basic forms of corruption; that, instead, conventions and norms — an honor system, essentially — is all that stand between presidents and the gross abuse of their power.
This is a good, short piece, riffing off of the 2018 book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. The Republicans, Trump, the Supreme Court, billionaires, corporations, and corporate shareholders are using America’s legal system to substantially weaken our democracy. It’s not a new thing for the powerful to place themselves above the law, but the pace and openness with which it’s happening right now is alarming.
Yesterday, a Washington DC grand jury indicted Donald Trump for “for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding”, aka trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Heather Cox Richardson lays it out in plain English:
The Trump team used lies about the election to justify organizing fraudulent slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Allegedly with the help of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, they attempted to have the legitimate electors that accurately reflected the voters’ choice of Biden replaced with fraudulent ones that claimed Trump had won in their states, first by convincing state legislators they had the power to make the switch, and then by convincing Vice President Mike Pence he could choose the Trump electors.
When Pence would not fraudulently alter the election results, Trump whipped up the crowd he had gathered in Washington, D.C., against Pence and then, according to the indictment, “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” to overturn the election results. “As violence ensued,” the indictment reads, Trump and his co-conspirators “explained the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.” On the evening of January 6, 2021, the indictment alleges, Trump and Co-Conspirator 1 called seven senators and one representative and asked them to delay the certification of Biden’s election.
The indictment makes clear that Donald Trump and his accomplices planned to seize power by force and then maintain that power through the mass murder of American citizens by their own military.
That sounds pretty serious — here’s what the indictment says:
On the afternoon of January 3, Co-Conspirator 4 spoke with a Deputy White House Counsel. The previous month, the Deputy White House Counsel had informed the Defendant that “there is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House [o]n January 20th.” Now, the same Deputy White House Counsel tried to dissuade Co-Conspirator 4 from assuming the role of Acting Attorney General. The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Co-Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
And this:
Also on January 4, when Co-Conspirator 2 acknowledged to the Defendant’s Senior Advisor that no court would support his proposal, the Senior Advisor told Co-Conspirator 2, “[Y]ou’re going to cause riots in the streets.” Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had previously been points in the nation’s history where violence was necessary to protect the republic. After that conversation, the Senior Advisor notified the Defendant that Co-Conspirator 2 had conceded that his plan was not going to work.
HuffPost explains who Co-Conspirator 4 is (top Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark) and what the Insurrection Act is all about. Co-Conspirator 2 is John Eastman, one of Trump’s lawyers.
Trump and his team were going to unlawfully (and immorally, I would argue) seize power and quell protests with military force by claiming there was a rebellion against the government or that public safety was at stake. Whether the military would have gone along with it (if Pence had chosen to play his part) is unknown, but it’s pretty incredible how close we came to the United States very quickly devolving into a dictatorship. This fucking traitor must be held accountable for his crimes and must not ever be allowed anywhere near any public office in the United States ever again.
Update: Updated the post to add a second passage from the indictment about the use of state violence to quell protest.
I just finished reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (so good!) and while doing a little customary post-read research on it, I discovered that Butler wrote a sequel in 1998 called Parable of the Talents and, uh… (from Wikipedia):
The novel is set against the backdrop of a dystopian United States that has come under the grip of a Christian fundamentalist denomination called “Christian America” led by President Andrew Steele Jarret. Seeking to restore American power and prestige, and using the slogan “Make America Great Again”, Jarret embarks on a crusade to cleanse America of non-Christian faiths. Slavery has resurfaced with advanced “shock collars” being used to control slaves. Virtual reality headsets known as “Dreamasks” are also popular since they enable wearers to escape their harsh reality.
Well, our present reality certainly checks a remarkable number of those boxes, including an absolute bullseye on “Make America Great Again”.
Trump may be the grand master of the Gish Gallop, but he is not its originator. That honor goes to the person who gave the method its name: Duane Tolbert Gish.
Gish was a biochemist at the Institute for Creation Research, a pseudo-scientific group that maintains all life on Earth was created in six days by the God of the Old Testament at some point in the past 10,000 years, with evolution playing no part. Gish publicized the ICR and its creed — and himself — by winning debates against evolutionists across the country.
During debates, after letting his opponent go first, Gish would “begin talking very quickly for perhaps an hour”, overwhelming his opponent with factual-sounding nonsense. According to Hasan, there are a few tactics you can use to counter the Gish Gallop, but you’ve got to be prepared. For instance, you can call them out:
Don’t let your audience be fooled into assuming that your opponent has special command of the subject because of all the “facts” they’ve just spouted. Explain to them what your opponent is doing, and that the Gallop is really just a sleight of hand.
Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, writes about the recent revitalization of the long tradition in the United States of fascist movements using race & racism as tools to move towards their goals. And now with attacks on the courts, education, voting rights, and women’s rights, America is now in fascism’s legal phase.
According to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 states have considered 230 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines).
The Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy. The fascist movement in the Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment. Using the bogeyman of critical race theory, 29 states have introduced bills to restrict teaching about racism and sexism in schools, and 13 states have enacted such bans.
Something I was disappointed about on last week’s anniversary of the terrorist attack on Congress was too much emphasis on Trump’s role in what happened on that day, as if focusing on him somehow makes it possible that the rest of the Republican Party can jettison this bad seed at some point without losing face and American politics can get back to the bipartisan business as usual. This is a total fiction, and as Stanley correctly notes, this shift towards fascism is a party-wide effort that preceded Trump and will outlive him.
Others (like Timothy Snyder) have been saying this for months and years, but in a succinct 8-minute monologue, Bill Maher1 lays out what’s going to happen over the next three years that will pave the way for Donald Trump and the Republicans to take back the White House and set up the biggest political crisis in the United States since the Civil War.
A document came to light a few weeks ago called the Eastman Memo, which was basically a blueprint prepared for Trump on how he could steal the election after he lost it in November 2020. It outlined a plan for overturning the election by claiming that seven states actually had competing state slates of electors, which while not even remotely true, would have given Mike Pence the excuse to throw out those states and thus hand the election to Trump.
But of course the plan required election officials in those states to go along. Trump thought the ones who were Republican would. Most did not. And that’s what he’s been working on fixing ever since.
You might have strong feelings about Bill Maher. Ok, fine. But he’s right about this.↩
After an inept coronavirus response, will the United States do better when the next pandemic strikes? Experts generally agree that America learned from the past year, and that the next public-health crisis won’t be quite as bewildering. But America’s pandemic preparedness still has major gaps, some of which are too big for any one administration to fix. In recent weeks, I’ve called back many of the experts I interviewed over the past 18 months about masks, testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and more. I asked them, “Are we ready for another one?” The short answer is “Not quite.” The long answer is that being truly “ready” will be harder than anyone realizes.
The Trump administration mishandled the American response to Covid-19 so completely that it’s tempting to pin most of the pandemic carnage on him. But the more I read about the pandemic (Michael Lewis’s The Premonition is a recent example), the more I have come to believe that the majority of the American pandemic deaths were baked in, no matter who was President. Trump was definitely a worst-case scenario, but even a more competent person in the White House in Jan 2020 (like Clinton or Sanders or Romney) would not have done so much better. Poor public health infrastructure, politicized government agencies, no mandatory paid leave, an overpriced healthcare system that only works for some, uncoordinated national response (+ federalism), years of defunding government programs, a reactive (rather than proactive) CDC, unhealthy populace, poverty, systemic racism in medicine, entitled individualism, high rate of uninsured people, growing anti-science sentiment — the pandemic was destined to race through the United States like a brush fire no matter what.
Even the European Union, whose member nations do not share many of America’s aforementioned challenges (but have other issues), did only marginally better than the US in preventing Covid deaths. The UK did worse:
This is an incredible video investigation by the NY Times of the January 6th attack on Congress by terrorists, rioters, and supporters of Donald Trump. They analyzed hundreds of videos, police bodycam footage, and police communications to reconstruct a minute-by-minute account of the Capital breach.
Most of the videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.
As Mr. Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his message to “walk down to the Capitol,” they interpreted it as the president sending reinforcements. “There’s about a million people on their way now,” we heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump’s speech played from a loudspeaker.
The call and response didn’t stop there. We found evidence of his influence once the violence was well underway. In one moment, a woman with a megaphone urged rioters to climb through a broken window by asking them to “stand up for our country and Constitution” — echoing the language in an earlier tweet from Mr. Trump. In another, as the police were pushing to clear the mob off the building, a rioter screamed at officers: “I was invited here by the president.”
It is astonishing to me how close we came to having a hostage or assassination situation with members of Congress and the Vice-President — like literal seconds and minutes away — and how is this not the only topic of conversation over the past 6 months in our country? And not only that, it’s clear that we’re not really going to do anything about it, aside from beefing up Capitol security and imprisoning some of the insurrectionists. This isn’t over — as the video’s narration states near the end: “The forces that brought them there have not gone away.”
What, then, are the advantages of political buffoonery? Off-hand, considering Amin’s career, I can think of at least five:
1) It leads opponents to underestimate the ability and intelligence of the buffoon.
2) It provides deniability — “it was only a joke.”
3) It appeals to core supporters (many Africans loved Amin’s teasing of the former colonial masters).
4) It serves as a distraction from the more serious, perhaps frightening or incompetent, actions of the leader, what we now call the “dead cat” tactic.
5) It leads to ambiguity (was it a joke or not?), producing confusion and uncertainty about how to respond.
Behind all this is clearly what Freud recognized as the aggressive nature of joking. I suggest that buffoonery is, at root, a quintessentially masculine characteristic.
If you’ve lived though recent UK and US politics, I expect you’re furiously nodding your head at all this right now. (via sam potts)
Using the POLITY data series, The Center for Systemic Peace has downgraded the system of government of the United States of America from a democracy to an anocracy, a “regime that mixes democratic with autocratic features”. From a notice on the front page of the CSP website:
The USA has dropped below the “democracy threshold” (+6) on the POLITY scale in 2020 and and is now considered an anocracy (+5). It has also lost its designation as the world’s oldest, continuous democracy; that designation now belongs to Switzerland (171 years), followed by New Zealand (142) and the United Kingdom (139). Further degradation of democratic authority in the USA will trigger an Adverse Regime Change event.
The downgrade can be tied directly to the Trump administration’s actions over the past four years:
In 2019, CSP changed the USA code for Executive Constraints from 7 to 6 due to the executive’s systematic rejection of congressional oversight; dropping its POLITY score to +7 and resetting its DURABLE score to “0”. In 2020, the coding for Executive Constraints will fall another point or two due to the executive’s systematic purge of “disloyalists” from the administration, forceful response to protest, vilification of the main opposition parties; and undermining public trust in the electoral process, reducing the USA POLITY score in 2020 to +5 (anocracy).
Their analysis also places the US at “high risk of impending political instability (i.e., adverse regime change and/or onset of political violence)” and designates “the ongoing efforts of the USA executive to circumvent electoral outcomes and subvert democratic processes as an ‘attempted (presidential) coup’”.
For the occasion of Donald Trump’s last day as President, Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits his essay published in the October 2017 of The Atlantic, The First White President, which argued persuasively that Trump is a white supremacist. In a new introduction, he writes:
It was popular, at the time of Donald Trump’s ascension, to stand on the thinnest of reeds in order to avoid stating the obvious. It was said that the Trump presidency was the fruit of “economic anxiety,” of trigger warnings and the push for trans rights. We were told that it was wrong to call Trump a white supremacist, because he had merely “drawn upon their themes.”
One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are — or should be — on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened — that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.
I am tired of reciting all his crimes, misdeeds, and failures. Trump was a cruel, petty tyrant of a president who surrounded himself with similarly terrible people, slobbering sycophants, and political operatives who knew they could advance their agendas so long as they told him what he wanted to hear.
Trump is the living embodiment of shamelessness. He cannot be shamed. He does not care about the 400,000 dead Americans he has barely acknowledged. He does not care about the suffering he has caused. He does not care about anything that happens beyond the country’s borders. He does not care that he has disrupted the peaceful transfer of power. He is a catastrophe and he does not care. His children are exactly like him. His wife is exactly like him. I wish nothing but the very worst for them, for the rest of their days.
This video from Matthew Cooke is an excellent and succinct plea for Republicans and Trump supporters to come back to reality.
This is a wake-up call for Republicans. America elected Joe Biden by over 7 million votes, and you’re confused because you didn’t see us flock to his rallies and cheer his smackdowns like we were at a pro wrestling event during a global pandemic. We don’t wear matching hats or have “no more malarkey” flags waving from the backs of our trucks. Do you know why? Because Biden is not our tribal warlord. We believe the job of a U.S. President is to represent more than one interest group. That’s why 81 million of us turned out to stop a narcissistic personality cult that embodies all seven of the deadly sins — most of all pride, which you’ve taken to levels of blasphemy, claiming your political leaders are handpicked by Jesus Christ.
This country is called the United States and we have multiple converging crises that need adult supervision but we are being distracted trying to get control over a critical mass of you who no longer believe in reality.
I don’t know if it will be persuasive to actual Republicans, but it’s a solid attempt.
From Luke Mogelson in The New Yorker, Among the Insurrectionists is an amazing and surreal account of how the January 6th domestic terror assault on Congress1 unfolded. (Note: This piece contains accounts of violence and lots of racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic language.)
The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. “Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776 — it’s now or never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. … USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter” with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert — a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol — had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”
When Babbitt was shot, I was on the opposite side of the Capitol, where people were growing frustrated by the empty halls and offices.
“Where the fuck are they?”
“Where the fuck is Nancy?”
No one seemed quite sure how to proceed. “While we’re here, we might as well set up a government,” somebody suggested.
Notably, the piece places the insurrection in the proper context alongside Trump’s campaign of misinformation (which began even before his Presidency and has focused heavily on election fraud) and as part of an escalating series of actions by militant fascist groups in DC and around the country.
In the days before January 6th, calls for a “real solution” became progressively louder. Trump, by both amplifying these voices and consolidating his control over the Republican Party, conferred extraordinary influence on the most deranged and hateful elements of the American right. On December 20th, he retweeted a QAnon supporter who used the handle @cjtruth: “It was a rigged election but they were busted. Sting of the Century! Justice is coming!” A few weeks later, a barbarian with a spear was sitting in the Vice-President’s chair.
Cause, effect. Here are more instances, from various times during the past few months:
It was clear that the men outside Harry’s on December 12th had travelled to D.C. to engage in violence, and that they believed the President endorsed their doing so. Trump had made an appearance at the previous rally, waving through the window of his limousine; now I overheard a Proud Boy tell his comrade, “I wanna see Trump drive by and give us one of these.” He flashed an “O.K.” hand sign, which has become a gesture of allegiance among white supremacists. There would be no motorcade this time, but while Fuentes addressed the groypers Trump circled Freedom Plaza in Marine One, the Presidential helicopter.
…
During the Presidential campaign, Trump’s histrionic exaggerations of the threat posed by Antifa fuelled conservative support for the Proud Boys, allowing them to vastly expand their operations and recruitment. The day after a Presidential debate in which Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” Lauren Witzke, a Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, publicly thanked the group for having provided her with “free security.”
…
Early returns showed Trump ahead in Michigan, but many absentee ballots had yet to be processed. Because Trump had relentlessly denigrated absentee voting throughout the campaign, in-person votes had been expected to skew his way. It was similarly unsurprising when his lead diminished after results arrived from Wayne County and other heavily Democratic jurisdictions. Nonetheless, shortly after midnight, Trump launched his post-election misinformation campaign: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election.”
The next day, I found an angry mob outside the T.C.F. Center. Police officers guarded the doors. Most of the protesters had driven down from Macomb County, which is eighty per cent white and went for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. “We know what’s going on here,” one man told me. “They’re stuffing the ballot box.”
…
In April, in response to Whitmer’s aggressive public-health measures, Trump had tweeted, “Liberate Michigan!” Two weeks later, heavily armed militia members entered the state capitol, terrifying lawmakers.
…
During Trump’s speech on January 6th, he said, “The media is the biggest problem we have.” He went on, “It’s become the enemy of the people. … We gotta get them straightened out.” Several journalists were attacked during the siege. Men assaulted a Times photographer inside the Capitol, near the rotunda, as she screamed for help. After National Guard soldiers and federal agents finally arrived and expelled the Trump supporters, some members of the mob shifted their attention to television crews in a park on the east side of the building. Earlier, a man had accosted an Israeli journalist in the middle of a live broadcast, calling him a “lying Israeli” and telling him, “You are cattle today.” Now the Trump supporters surrounded teams from the Associated Press and other outlets, chasing off the reporters and smashing their equipment with bats and sticks.
Update: This is an incredible video companion to this article — videos shot by Mogelson during assault on Congress:
I’ve seen many folks and media outlets refer to the events of January 6, 2021 as an attack “on the Capitol”. While that is technically correct, focusing on the venue obscures the true target: Congress. This was an attack on the entire legislative branch of the United States government. Being explicit about that point is important.↩
Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.
Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it.
My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present.
Snyder quotes Hannah Arendt in this piece and I’m going share a quote of hers I’ve shared before:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie-a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days-but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
I think about her last line all the time: “And with such a people you can then do what you please.” Like make them assault Congress on behalf of yourself and your political party. This was not Snyder’s closing paragraph, but I’m going to end this post with it:
The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?
Election officials in dozens of states representing both political parties said that there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the presidential race, amounting to a forceful rebuke of President Trump’s portrait of a fraudulent election.
Over the last several days, the president, members of his administration, congressional Republicans and right wing allies have put forth the false claim that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and have refused to accept results that showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner.
But top election officials across the country said in interviews and statements that the process had been a remarkable success despite record turnout and the complications of a dangerous pandemic.
Of course, the Republicans have made no fraud claims about states where they did well. Every Republican who the media projected to be the winner has claimed victory on that basis. And if the Democrats were somehow cheating, wouldn’t they have done far better on down-ballot races — presumably hundreds of thousands of fake ballots for Biden would also have gone for Democratic Senate and House candidates as well? The whole thing is obviously absurd.
For the New Yorker, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes that as much noise and pain that Donald Trump generated while he was in office, it can’t hold a candle to America’s systemic problems, which remain unaddressed by both major parties.
Like tens of millions of Americans, I voted to end the miserable reign of Donald J. Trump, but we cannot perpetuate the election-year fiction that the deep and bewildering problems facing millions of people in this country will simply end with the Trump Administration. They are embedded in “the system,” in systemic racism, and the other social inequities that are the focus of continued activism and budding social movements. Viewing the solution to these problems as simply electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both underestimates the depth of the problems and trivializes the remedies necessary to undo the damage. That view may also confuse popular support for fundamental change, as evidenced by Trump’s one-term Presidency, with what the Democratic Party is willing or even able to deliver.
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