kottke.org posts about Donald Trump
Watch video on YouTube.
Disney dropped the trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu today, a feature-length film that will debut in theaters in May 2026. As this Star Wars Explained breakdown, er, explains, that the trailer was going to come out earlier but:
Word on the street is that it was supposed to come out this past Friday, but Disney was and is in the middle of some hot water. Acting like cowards in the face of authoritarianism will do that, especially when one of the franchises you own {shows footage of Andor} is about the exact opposite.
Last week, Disney made the decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live from the schedule because of threats from the Trump regime, prompting protests. Kimmel returns to the air tomorrow night:
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the company said in a statement. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
Watch video on YouTube.
Jamelle Bouie on Democratic politicians who maddeningly cannot recognize and acknowledge what is going on in the country.
From my perspective, the story of American politics right now is that the president, who fashions himself a kind of king of America, is attempting to barricade himself in the capital by unleashing a military occupation on its residents. And he’s promised to extend this military occupation to other cities and other states that he views as political opponents.
That to me is the big story of American politics right now: a mad king openly exerting tyrannical power over Americans and threatening further tyrannical power against other Americans, all under a pretext of crime reduction.
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina (aka Your Local Epidemiologist) has a frustrating update on how Covid vaccines are probably going to work this fall under the ideologically corrupt Trump regime.
The FDA is expected to license the Covid-19 vaccine. Word is that the label will be restricted to adults 65+ and people at high risk.
The Vaccine Integrity Project and professional organizations likely won’t align with RFK Jr.’s FDA license, which will cause confusion.
If you’re younger than 65 and don’t have a chronic condition, could you still get it after the label change?
Yes, but it will be complicated. While a provider could prescribe it off-label, in practice, it’s likely that most people won’t be able to access it that way.
Jetelina continues:
If you’re under 65 and not high risk, the window to get a Covid-19 vaccine is right now — before the FDA label changes. Once it happens, access will be limited immediately (if it isn’t already). CVS is no longer booking appointments. As far as we know, Walgreens and local pharmacies still are.
That was as of Monday — no idea if that’s still the case. And of course, because this is the United States, insurance will probably be a mess too:
Recommendations from these two organizations are really important for insurers. The hope is they see them and cover all vaccines, regardless of what RFK does. It also provides extra information to physicians who will prescribe off-label if RFK Jr’s FDA changes the label (as expected) this Friday.
We will not know if any of these recommendations affect insurance coverage until insurance companies confirm coverage.
[insert a lot of profanity here; seriously, this makes me so incandescently mad that if I wrote anything more it would contain every fucking swear word I know and then some]
Sources: Aug 18 thread on Bluesky, Aug 20 thread on Bluesky, Aug 18 newsletter.
On April 9, 2016, several months before Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, the Boston Globe ran an editorial entitled “The GOP must stop Donald Trump”.
Donald J. Trump’s vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American.
It is easy to find historical antecedents. The rise of demagogic strongmen is an all too common phenomenon on our small planet. And what marks each of those dark episodes is a failure to fathom where a leader’s vision leads, to carry rhetoric to its logical conclusion. The satirical front page of this section attempts to do just that, to envision what America looks like with Trump in the White House.
It is an exercise in taking a man at his word. And his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page. It is a vision that demands an active and engaged opposition. It requires an opposition as focused on denying Trump the White House as the candidate is flippant and reckless about securing it.
As part of the editorial, they imagined a Globe front page one year into a future Trump presidency:
Some of the headlines read “Deportations to Begin: President Trump calls for tripling of ICE force; riots continue” and “Markets sink as trade war looms”. They may have gotten the timeline and some of the details wrong, but many of the Globe’s fake headlines now read as tame.
In his second term, Trump has removed any pretense of governing and is full steam ahead on indulging his bigotry, filling his coffers, playing Big Boy Diplomat, and replacing the American system of democracy with a conservative authoritarian government. And as the editorial notes, all you had to do to predict it was to take Trump at his word. (via @epicciuto.bsky.social)
Ross Anderson writes about how scientific empires, from the ancient Sumerians to the Nazis to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, have crumbled (or been willfully dismantled by ideologues) and the clear signs that the same thing is happening here in the United States under the conservative regime.
The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. “It’s very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,” Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University’s undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now.
Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science — the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others — and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility — or else be subject to correction by political appointees.
And so:
Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since [World War II]. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America’s research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”
Yesterday, the NY Times published an article about Donald Trump’s threat to take away citizenship from a US-born citizen: Trump threatens to strip Rosie O’Donnell of U.S. citizenship. The Times Bluesky account posted a link to the article accompanied by this text:
President Trump said on Saturday he was considering revoking Rosie O’Donnell’s U.S. citizenship. Trump has feuded with the comedian and actress since before he became president. Experts said the president does not have the power to take away the citizenship of a U.S.-born citizen.
Large media companies, and the NY Times in particular these days, like to use the phrase “experts said” instead of simply stating facts. The thing is, many other statements of plain truth in that brief Times post lack the confirmation of expertise. To aid the paper in steering their readers away from notions of objective truth, here’s a suggested rewrite of that Bluesky post:
Donald Trump, who experts said is president of the United States, which experts said is a sovereign state on the planet Earth, which experts said is an oblate spheroid and revolves around the Sun, which experts said is a G-type main-sequence star about 93 million miles from us, said on what experts said was Saturday that he was considering revoking (which experts said is a process of making invalid) the U.S. citizenship of a person with the last name of O’Donnell, who experts said is a living human person and U.S. citizen with the first name of Rosie (which experts said is a diminutive of Roseann). Trump, who experts said has feuded with the person who experts said is a comedian and actress since, experts said, before he became president (again, experts said this, that Trump is the president and that also there exists a time (which experts said i— {Do we really need to cite someone on the concept of time here? Surely, time is just time and everyone kinda sorta gets that? -ed}) before he was president). Experts said the president, who experts said doesn’t simply float away into the cosmos because of the mutually attractive force of gravity between him and the Earth, does not have the power (which experts said is whatever Robert Caro said it was in that heavy book about Robert Moses; the experts honestly did not make it through the whole thing) to take away the citizenship of a U.S.-born citizen.
Or, I guess you could do it the easy way:
President Trump said on Saturday he was considering revoking Rosie O’Donnell’s U.S. citizenship. Trump has feuded with the comedian and actress since before he became president. Experts said The president does not have the power to take away the citizenship of a U.S.-born citizen.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
PS. Rolling Stone did waaay better with this story: Trump Thinks He Can Take Away Citizenship From Anyone He Doesn’t Like. And see also the NY Times Pitchbot if you are unaware of its existence.
PPS. The image is a political cartoon from 1894 — you can see the full version at the Library of Congress.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, one of America’s leading public intellectuals, posted this to Bluesky yesterday:
I’m going to be very honest and clear.
I am fully preparing myself to die under this new American regime. That’s not to say that it’s the end of the world. It isn’t. But I am almost 50 years old. It will take so long to do anything with this mess that this is the new normal for *me*.
I do hope a lot of you run. I hope you vote, sure. Maybe do a general strike or rent strike. All great!
But I spent the last week reading things and this is not, for ME, an electoral fix. So now I will spend time reflecting on how to integrate this normal into my understanding of the future.
Most of this will be personal. Some of it will be public — how we move in the world.
Right now, I know that I need to make a decision on my risk sensitivity. How much can I take? I also need to meditate HARD on accepting the randomness of that risk. No amount of strategy can protect me.
Those are things I am thinking about.
In response, Anil Dash posted:
Yeah, I keep telling people this is a rest-of-my-life fight, and… they do *not* want to hear it.
Author Meg Elison:
I’ve been thinking something like this for a few months now. We will fight, we will resist, etc. But we will also not live the lives we picked out and planned on. They’re not available anymore.
Therapist and political activist Leah McElrath:
Since Trump regained office, I’ve talked about this both gently and bluntly to try to help people understand that we lived in one era but we’re going to die in another.
I am, at least. I know my probable life expectancy and, at 61, have about 15 years left.
And @2naonwheat.bsky.social:
We’re all going to have to start planting shade trees we fully know we’ll never sit under.
Cottom nails how I’ve been feeling for the past few months (and honestly why it’s been a little uneven around KDO recently). America’s democratic collapse has been coming for years, always just over the horizon. But when everything that happened during Trump’s first three months in office happened and (here’s the important part) shockingly little was done by the few groups (Congress, the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party, American corporations & other large institutions, media companies) who had the power to counter it, I knew it was over. And over in a way that is irreversible, for a good long while at least.
Since then, I’ve been recalibrating and grieving. Feeling angry — furious, really. Fighting resignation. Trying not to fall prey to doomerism and subsequently spreading it to others. (This post is perhaps an exception, but I believe, as Cottom does, in being “honest and clear” when times call for it.) Getting out. Biking, so much biking. Paying less attention to the news. Trying to celebrate other facets of our collective humanity here on KDO — or just being silly & stupid. Feeling overwhelmed. Feeling numb. But also (occasionally, somehow) hope?
All of this is exhausting. Destabilizing. I don’t know what I’m doing or what I should be doing or how I can be of the most service to others. (Put on your oxygen mask before assisting others, they say. Is my mask on yet? I don’t know — how can I even tell?) I barely know what I’m trying to say and don’t know how to end this post so I’m just gonna say that the comments are open on this post (be gentle with each other, don’t make me regret this) and I’ll be back with you here after the, uh, holiday.
Watch video on YouTube.
Diego Luna is guest-hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live this week and for his first monologue, the Mexico native spoke about immigration and what he’s experienced and observed in the US and LA during his time here.
Diego steps in as our first guest host of the summer and talks about how much Los Angeles means to him, the very important immigration issues happening here and across the United States right now, the authoritarian policies of Donald Trump, his son being born in LA, finding community here, the importance of immigrants and the amazing things they bring to America, how unfair it is that they are living in fear, the violence and separating of families being unacceptable, and he encourages everyone to call their representatives and let them know how they feel about it, and support organizations like Public Counsel and Kids in Need of Defense.
Among a number of things I’ve read online that I think about all the time is David Roberts’ 2020 piece for Vox about shifting baselines.
Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.
Concepts developed in sociology and psychology can help us understand why it happens — and why it is such a danger in an age of accelerating, interlocking crises. Tackling climate change, pandemics, or any of a range of modern global problems means keeping our attention on what’s being lost, not just over our lifetimes, but over generations.
Roberts cites the work of fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly in explaining the concept:
So what are shifting baselines? Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience.
And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.
Over time, the fish goes extinct — an enormous, tragic loss — but no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action. By the time the fish go extinct, the fishers barely notice, because they no longer valued the fish anyway.
Shifting baselines can also occur in individuals and across shorter timelines, especially in intense situations. In a recent piece for the NY Times, M. Gessen warns that we’re entering a new phase of the Trump Era:
In this country, too, fewer and fewer things can surprise us. Once you’ve absorbed the shock of deportations to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan aren’t that remarkable. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around the Trump administration’s revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn’t entirely unexpected.
Once you’ve realized that the administration is intent on driving thousands of trans people out of the U.S. military, a ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which could have devastating effects for hundreds of thousands, just becomes more of the same. As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.
This stasis, complacency, and boredom is what I was getting at in this post from March:
And but so anyway, the point is that there’s so much important stuff going on! Fundamental human rights are under fresh attack daily! This is not a drill! But at the same time, the fundamental situation has not materially changed in a few weeks. There was a coup. It was successful. It is ongoing and escalating. Elon Musk retains more or less total control over a huge amount of the federal government’s apparatus and its spending. Protests are building. Congress largely hasn’t reacted. The Democratic Party shows few signs of behaving like an opposition party. Some of the purges are being walked back, piecemeal. The judiciary is weighing in, slowly. There’s talk of cracks in the conservative coalition. We’re in a weird sort of stasis where each day’s events are both extremely significant and also just more of the same.
Humans can get used to almost anything. At times, our shifting baselines can be a source of resilience even in the face of great peril. They also can result in great injustice. I don’t have any advice about staying engaged during periods like these, but awareness is surely part of it.
Watch video on YouTube.
At the end of March, I posted some news about three prominent scholars of fascism and authoritarianism who were leaving the United States to live and work in Canada. In this video for the NY Times, We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S., Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley explain their reasons for going. Here’s some of what they had to say:
I’m leaving to the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.
The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later.
My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, “We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.” And I thought my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. Our ship can’t sink. And what you know is a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.
I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency.
Toni Morrison warned us: “The descent into a final solution is not a jump. It’s one step. And then another. And then another.” We are seeing those steps accelerated right now.
Robert Paxton is one of the world’s foremost scholars of fascism and in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism (Bookshop), he defined the term:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Paxton famously declined to label Donald Trump a fascist, warning against overuse of the term, before changing his mind after January 6th’s attack on Congress.
Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told me. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”
When an editor at Newsweek reached out to Paxton, he decided to publicly declare a change of mind. In a column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton wrote that the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he went on. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
See also Umberto Eco’s 14 Features of Eternal Fascism, How Fascism Works, Toni Morrison’s Ten Steps Towards Fascism, and Rick Steves’ The Story of Fascism. (via @chadloder.bsky.social)
Silenced Science Stories is a collaboration between scientists and artists to tell the stories of scientific experts who have been affected by the Trump regime’s purge of their ranks.
We are organizing an illustrated series of portraits and stories of scientific experts whose work is being affected by federal budget cuts and mass firings.
We have over 30 science artists who are volunteering to create these features to communicate the careers and the important scientific research of federally employed and funded scientists.
If you’d like to get involved, they are looking for both artists and scientists with stories to tell. You can read more about the project in Physics Today. (via jonathan hoefler)
Sherrilyn Ifill on those who got it wrong about Trump and the Republicans:
If you have a public platform & spent years calming everyone down, telling us Trump was not a danger, was not racist, & arguing that the best way to deal w/Trump was to laugh at him, berated ppl who used the word fascist, insisted that the two parties are the same, admit YOU WERE WRONG.
We need to fight the [threat] arm-in-arm. But we need leadership w/discernment. If you misdiagnosed this threat, you should not take a front seat in analyzing the current moment or providing the strategy for how we confront what we are facing w/o admitting how badly you misjudged the threat. And LISTEN.
100%. I’m glad more and more people are waking up to the reality of Trump, but if the danger wasn’t plain to you until now, you should definitely let others lead the way from here — listen more, talk less. And for the rest of us, we should be more choosy in deciding who to listen to. For me, the “ope, maybe this is fascism after all” latecomers, particularly the “rational” “centrists” insistent on both-sidesing this whole situation since 2016, are not getting a lot of my attention these days.
For the past 11 years, the Breakthrough Prize awards have “celebrated outstanding scientific achievements, honoring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in gene editing, human diseases, the search for the fundamental laws of the Universe and pure mathematics”. At this year’s awards, Edward Norton & Seth Rogen presented a prize in fundamental physics and Rogen took the opportunity to remind the audience — including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman — that the Trump regime is actively destroying the ability for people to pursue science in America.
And it’s amazing that others [who have been] in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science. It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr, very fast.
Rogen’s remarks were heard during the live presentation but have been scrubbed from the video on YouTube. I haven’t seen the uncensored video anywhere…drop me a line if you run across it?
Harvard is refusing to comply with Trump’s demands related to his regime’s racist, xenophobic political agenda, including a threat to cut $9 billion in research funding. From the AP:
Harvard President Alan Garber, in a letter to the Harvard community Monday, said the demands violated the university’s First Amendment rights and “exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI,” which prohibits discrimination against students based on their race, color or national origin.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote, adding that the university had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.
“These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate,” he wrote. “The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community.”
You can read Garber’s letter and the letter Harvard received from the Trump regime.
I recently attended a virtual talk and Q&A with Timothy Snyder and when he was asked about Columbia and other schools capitulating to Trump’s demands and what needs to happen in order to stop it, he replied something along the lines of: “Some big school is gonna have to stick their neck out and take the hit. Say ‘no’ unequivocally to Trump and get their funding pulled. Lead by example and others will follow. Solidarity is the only way out of this.” Good on Harvard1 for helping to lead the way on this…hopefully more schools will find their backbone after this.
Heather Cox Richardson on where we are right now in terms of what type of government we currently have:
Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.
They are 100% going to try to do this with citizens:
Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating is still well above 40% (and is even higher if you don’t factor in the economy/tariffs). 🤷♂️
Ryan Broderick on how, with the trade war that Trump’s tariffs has unleashed, we are speedrunning Brexit and other hyper-inflationary financial crises (thread) and Americans may soon find out what happens when US dollars don’t buy anything.
So from my uniquely weird perspective after living in the UK through Brexit, being in India during Modi’s demonetization, and living in Brazil when the real tanked during the Bolsonaro administration, I can confidently say that Americans do not and can not understand how bad this is going to be.
To sort of broadly describe what is about to happen if the Trump admin doesn’t reverse course, we are quickly racing towards a world where not only does our money just not work correctly anymore day to day, but the background radiation of a crumbling economy will become impossible to ignore.
After the Brexit referendum, everything in London just got slightly worse. A year or two in, you could feel it. But that’s because it took five years for the country to actually leave the EU. We’re speedrunning that. In Brazil, prices would change overnight, stores just wouldn’t have stuff.
There’s more; read the whole thing. Broderick was reacting to this brief WSJ piece (archive):
The broad selloff in U.S. stocks and bonds, and the continuing decline in the dollar, represents a “simultaneous collapse in the price of all U.S. assets,” analysts at Deutsche Bank said Wednesday. They warned that “unchartered territory” lies ahead.
- Markets are dedollarizing, they said, citing the lack of evidence that investors are hoarding dollar liquidity— a dynamic that in previous market routs fueled Treasury and U.S. dollar rallies but this time is leading to declines in the prices of both.
- The administration is encouraging the Treasury selloff, they said, in a bid to bring down U.S. asset valuations—a decision they said now is exposing the fact that “reducing bilateral trade imbalances is functionally equivalent to lowering demand for U.S. assets as well.”
- A financial war with China could lie ahead, they conclude, contending that “there is little room now left for an escalation on the trade front” and that “there can be no winner to such a war.”
I’ve been saying since his election that Trump was going to drive the economy into the ditch. This is more like driving it off a cliff.
For The Guardian, the film critic Guy Lodge has complied a list of 25 films that “shed light on the US under Trump”. From the introduction by filmmaker Alex Gibney:
This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want it. They’re not much interested in democracy either, it turns out. Nor, apparently, the rule of law. The government is not the solution — it’s the problem. And now a vengeful president who just wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card is going to punish his enemies and show us all how to destroy the American administrative state by using the big stick of Elon Musk’s chequebook.
Here are a few of the films and their trailers — you can check out the article for the rest.
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016):
Watch video on YouTube.
Election (Alexander Payne, 1999):
Watch video on YouTube.
White Noise (Daniel Lombroso, 2020) {Note: this is not the DeLillo adaptation}:
Watch video on YouTube.
American Factory (Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, 2019):
Watch video on YouTube.
I’m curious…what films would you add to the list?
On Saturday, millions of Americans flooded the streets of cities, small towns, and every other sized municipality in the nation to protest the illegal and damaging actions of the Trump regime. These photos published by a number of media outlets show the scale, enthusiasm, and creativity of these peaceful protests, in the US and around the world.
On April 5th, a group of prominent national organizations (including 50501, Indivisible, Hands Off, MoveOn, and Women’s March) and many local organizations are all coming together for a day of nationwide action and protest.
This is a nationwide mobilization to stop the most brazen power grab in modern history. Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies are orchestrating an all-out assault on our government, our economy, and our basic rights — enabled by Congress every step of the way.
They want to strip America for parts — shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid — all to bankroll their billionaire tax scam. They’re handing over our tax dollars, our public services, and our democracy to the ultra-rich.
If we don’t fight now, there won’t be anything left to save.
This is gonna be huge. There are events all over the country on April 5, and if there isn’t one near you, you can plan your own. There are signs you can print out to bring (or design/bring your own).
For more information, you can check out the Hands Off! website, the See You In the Streets site, or this informative collection of info from several sites/orgs.
With the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and, especially, again in 2024, the adjacent possible of American society has shifted dramatically. For the Washington Post, Philip Bump asked a number of people who study systems of government and the erosion of democracy the following question: “Given the country’s trajectory and what’s unfolded in other countries, what can we expect the United States to look like in five or 10 years’ time?”
Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die (Bookshop) and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (Bookshop):
I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long.
But also (emphasis mine):
I think it’s possible the flurry of abuses and attacks, first of all, and secondly, the incredibly weak response by civil society, suggests that the Trump administration can get away with much more than I think almost any of us anticipated. I would have thought it highly unlikely that the Trump administration could really seriously tilt the playing field in terms of media access and resource access, given the wealth and the diversity of the private sector in this country. A Hungary-like tilting of the playing field seemed really unlikely. Now, I think it’s possible.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Bookshop):
Domestically, you don’t need to abolish opposition parties today. You just engineer the electoral system to keep Democrats out of power.
Thomas Zimmer, author of Democracy Americana:
A little over two months after Trump returned to power, it seems undeniable that even critical observers underestimated the speed and scope of the Trumpist assault and overestimated democratic resilience in both the political system as well as civil society. In mere weeks, Trumpists have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy. That means we must recalibrate our expectations. “They are not going to go *that* far” has been proved wrong over and over again. The idea that “they won’t be able to do this” seems similarly unfounded. Let’s finally discard whatever notion of “it cannot happen here” that is still floating around.
God, the “it cannot happen here” argument was so stupid even back in 2016 when people were debating whether Trump was a fascist. If nothing else, it was clarifying to be able to stick anyone who was chastising others for worrying too much into the “I’m highly skeptical of anything you write now” box.
Anyway, the whole piece is worth a read.
I have one kid entering college this fall and one a few years away, so I’ve been thinking (with fury and sadness) about the effect that Trump’s authoritarian regime is having on American colleges and universities. They’re pulling funding from schools; schools are cancelling programs, freezing hiring, and cutting back on admissions; and NIH and NSF funding is being curtailed and withdrawn. College students are being snatched off the streets by ICE & DHS and schools either can’t or won’t do anything to stop it. If these actions persist, US colleges & universities could look quite different in a year or two.
In a piece called The End of College Life, Ian Bogost calls the potential effect of these changes a “calamity” and says “the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends”.
Any one of the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, let alone all of them together, could upend the college experience for millions of Americans. What’s at stake is far from trivial: Forget the frisbees on the quad; think of what it means to go to college in this country. Think of the middle-class ideal that has persisted for most of a century: earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.
This might all be changing for fancy private schools and giant public universities alike. If you, or your son, or your daughter, are in college now, or are planning to enroll in the years ahead, you should be worried.
I am curious to hear from parents of high school and college students, from college faculty & administrators, and from students themselves: how have the actions of the Trump regime changed your thinking about college? What plans are you making or changing? Let me know in the comments. (If you don’t have a membership but would like to leave a comment, just email me your thoughts and I’ll post it for you.)
In this episode of This American Life from a few weeks ago, Masha Gessen read an excerpt from their book Surviving Autocracy about the particular kind of lie used by autocrats like Putin and Trump.
Lies can serve a number of functions. People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by creating doubt, to escape confrontation or lighten the blow, to make themselves appear better, to get others to do or give something, and even to entertain.
However unskilled a person may be at lying, they usually hope that the lie will be convincing. Executives want shareholders to think that they have devised a foolproof path to profits. Defendants want juries to believe that there is a chance that someone else committed the crime.
People in relationships want their partners to think that they have never even considered cheating. Guests want the host to think that they like their fish overcooked. These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they are surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts.
The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show I can say what I want, when I want to.
The power lie conjures a different reality that demands that you choose between your experience and the bully’s demands. Are you going to insist that you’re wet from the rain or give in and say that the sun is shining?
I believe the bully lie fits into the same general category as fascists seeing hypocrisy as a virtue — it only really makes sense when you think about it in terms of domination or power. (thx, caroline)
There’s a letter at the end of this post that’s very much worth the read, but I have to explain some context first because otherwise it won’t make any sense. So:
The Trump regime has been targeting law firms “whose lawyers have provided legal work that Trump disagrees with” with executive orders that take away their security clearances and terminate their federal contracts. Yesterday, Trump rescinded his order against the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in exchange for a bribe in the form of the firm providing “$40m in free legal services to support his administration’s goals”. The settlement also includes an apparent agreement by Paul Weiss “to disavow the use of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations in its hiring and promotion decisions”.
Another of the law firms targeted by Trump is Perkins Coie, which has filed a lawsuit to fight the EO:
On March 11, 2025, we filed a legal action in response to a recent Executive Order that unlawfully targets Perkins Coie. The order violates core constitutional rights, including the rights to free speech and due process. At the heart of the order is an unlawful attack on the freedom of all Americans to select counsel of their choice without fear of retribution or punishment from the government. We were compelled to take this action to protect our firm and our clients.
In response to the Paul Weiss settlement news, Rachel Cohen, an associate at another law firm, Skadden Arps, sent a company-wide email to her colleagues last night with her “conditional” resignation notice, outlining her frustration with her firm’s unwillingness to support Perkins Coie’s lawsuit and related matters. She posted the letter to LinkedIn in image form — here’s the whole thing as text (boldface mine):
With gratitude and urgency.
Jeremy and colleagues,
Many deals I work on have concepts of conditional notice. This is mine.
Please consider this email my two week notice, revocable if the firm comes up with a satisfactory response to the current moment, which should include at minimum i) signing on to the firm amicus brief in support of Perkins Coie in its litigation fighting the Trump administration’s executive order against it, ii) committing to broad future representation, regardless of whether powerful people view it as adverse to them, iii) refusal to cooperate with the EEOC’s request for personal information of our colleagues clearly targeted at intimidating non-white employees, (iv) public refusal to fire or otherwise force out employees at the Trump administration’s directive or implied directive and (v) public commitment to maintenance of affinity groups and related initiatives.
This is not what I saw for my career or for my evening, but Paul Weiss’ decision to cave to the Trump administration on DEl, representation and staffing has forced my hand. We do not have time. It is now or it is never, and if it is never, I will not continue to work here.
When I went to law school and to Skadden, I did so in pursuit of agency. I was driven by a desire to be in rooms where decision-makers were, to get to play a role in things that mattered, because things felt so needlessly terrible. It never occurred to me that the people in those rooms might feel that they were powerless. I am forced to hope that our lack of response to the Trump administration’s attacks on our peers, both those at other large firms and the many people in this country with far fewer resources, is rooted in feelings of fear and powerlessness, as opposed to tacit agreement or desire to maximize profit. I still hope that is true. But it has not yet been borne out.
It feels mortifying to say “I suspect you know who I am,” but I suspect you know who I am. Over the last few weeks, I have devoted an inordinate amount of time trying to leverage various relationships and privileges to get our firm and broader industry to admit that we are in the throes of early-stage authoritarianism and that we are uniquely positioned to halt it. There is an open letter (now signed by over 600 other AmLaw 200 associates, many of them at this firm), mainstream media coverage and an oped explaining why I feel this way.
To anyone who feels sympathetic to the views I’ve espoused but wonders why I have taken the path I have: on Thursday, March 6, after the issuance of the Perkins Executive Order, I sent emails to multiple trusted partners in management asking to help with whatever response we coordinated.
One of them replied offering to talk and then failed to reply to my email asking for a time until a week later, significantly after I had begun speaking publicly. Know that I attended internal meetings about this topic, sent emails to decision makers, avoided commenting on the EEOC investigation publicly or airing any internal firm discourse publicly.
I did all of these things out of hope that we would do the right thing if given time and opportunity.
The firm has been given time and opportunity to do the right thing. Thus far, we have not. This is a moment that demands urgency. Whether we are failing to meet it because we are unprepared or because we don’t wish to is irrelevant to me — and to the world — where the outcome is the same. If we were going to resist, we would have done so already. If we were not going to respond to the EEOC (a refusal that would be fully legal), the firm would have already told us.
This is the first firmwide email that has been sent on this topic. What. Are. We. Doing.
Colleagues, if you question if it is as bad as you think it is, it is ten times worse. Whether what we measure is the cowardice in face of lost profits, or the proximity to authoritarianism, or the trauma inflicted on our colleagues who are nonwhite, or the disappointment that I feel in this moment, take what you suspect and multiply it by a factor of ten. Act accordingly.
I recognize not everyone is positioned as I am, and cannot act the same way. But do not recruit for this firm if they cannot protect their employees. Do not pretend that what is happening is normal or excusable. It isn’t.
To the many superiors, support staff and friends that I know I disappoint by making this announcement firmwide instead of talking to you first, I sincerely apologize. There are so many thank yous that I have for so many people at this firm. Please know that if you suspect that you have helped me or taught me or cared for me, that I agree and am eternally grateful. In the coming days, I will make every effort to reach out to you separately, but there is urgency here that makes it impossible to go to each of you first. I will do everything in my power to mitigate difficulties caused by my unexpected departure.
Like any self-important adolescent, I spent most of my high school history classes wondering what I would do in the moments before true horror or chaos or where my values were tested and demanded great sacrifice. I do not wonder anymore. I know who I am. I thought I knew who we all were.
Thank you for the opportunity. My personal email is cc’d. I wish each of you the best, and that you use the privileges you hold to work for the best for others.
Rachel
Cohen offered an update shortly after publishing her letter:
As an update, I no longer have access to my firm email, so I guess it’s just notice.
They owe me a payout for 24 accrued vacation days. Thank you and good night.
(via @annabower.bsky.social)
On Inauguration Day in January, Eliza McLamb wrote about her abstention from social media for a month and the challenge of keeping up with current events “without either turning towards ignorance or overwhelming myself with information”:
I’ve been thinking deeply about this idea recently — how much do I really need to know? I by no means think that I (or anyone) should be exempt from keeping up with the political and social going-ons of the world. Certainly, it’s invaluable to remember that one’s personal life is not reflective of the lives of everyone else. But I have recognized an impulse in myself to keep intaking information, as though it were a moral imperative to know every meticulous detail of all Earthly horrors. And, as much as I would like to think that it does, I don’t think that this impulse comes from duty. I think it comes from guilt. If I couldn’t directly help, the least I could do was witness. The least I could do was watch, feeling increasingly helpless, feeling increasingly numb.
Ultimately, I realized that this impulse actually resulted in me feeling less about the things I purported to care about. All the information swelled to a terrifying, dizzying checked-out-ed-ness, where I would make my way through a timeline that showed me children missing limbs in Palestine to an influencer’s makeup tutorial to details about Trump’s incoming cabinet to a house tour in the Hamptons. The bizarre, violent juxtaposition of it all started to turn my brain off. It was simply too much information.
I read this essay a few days after it was published and have been thinking about it (and related articles) more or less constantly ever since, not only in terms of what media & information I am consuming, but also in terms of what I’m sharing here.
Every damn day over the past month an a half, the Trump administration has dropped some new horror in their attempt to speed-run the fascist takeover of American democracy.1 All of it is relevant and all of it matters. Just two days ago, Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil, who is legally residing in the United States with a green card, was detained and imprisoned by DHS agents on some Trumped up nonsense about “[leading] activities aligned to Hamas” (he was one of the leaders of Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment). This is right out of the fascist playbook; Adam Serwer:
The way it works is that you strip fundamental rights from targets with less political support that people will turn their consciences off to justify persecuting and then eventually the state can do it to anyone, that’s always been the plan. Immigrants, trans people, palestinian rights activists, eventually it’s going to be your turn when the regime decides you are an enemy.
Here’s Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as reported by the New Republic:
You are shredding the Constitution of the United States to go after political enemies. Seizing a person without reason or warrant and denying them access to their lawyer is un-American and tyrannical,” she continued. “Anyone celebrating this should be ashamed.”
“If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too,” she wrote in a separate post. “Anyone - left, right, or center - who has highlighted the importance of constitutional rights + free speech should be sounding the alarm now.
Trump said he was going to deport his enemies (i.e. people who oppose him) and you’ve read the fucking poem, so I hope that somehow this can be stopped long before it reaches 50-something, white, male bloggers who live in rural Vermont, not at all for my personal sake but for every preceding person they try this shit on, up to and including Mahmoud Khalil.
And but so anyway, the point is that there’s so much important stuff going on! Fundamental human rights are under fresh attack daily! This is not a drill! But at the same time, the fundamental situation has not materially changed in a few weeks. There was a coup. It was successful. It is ongoing and escalating. Elon Musk retains more or less total control over a huge amount of the federal government’s apparatus and its spending. Protests are building. Congress largely hasn’t reacted. The Democratic Party shows few signs of behaving like an opposition party. Some of the purges are being walked back, piecemeal. The judiciary is weighing in, slowly. There’s talk of cracks in the conservative coalition. We’re in a weird sort of stasis where each day’s events are both extremely significant and also just more of the same.
So, the question I’ve constantly been asking myself is: How should I be covering all this? What is the best use of your attention and my time, platform, and abilities? For the first couple of weeks, getting good information and analysis out about what was going on seemed most important, along with expert contextualization of events, providing actionable information, focusing on the stakes not the odds, and emphasizing the human stories and costs of the coup.
I believe all those things are still important to highlight. And writing about this still feels like something I have to do. However it feels increasingly unproductive for me to keep up with the “day to day” (even when that means something as consequential as the disappearing of legal residents for political reasons) on KDO. Other people and outlets are better equipped to keep you informed about such events. I do not want to contribute to folks feeling helpless or numb from information overwhelm — that won’t do any of us, or our future prospects for democracy, any good.
So yeah, that’s where I am right now — between the opposite poles of too much and not enough — if that makes any sense at all. I don’t know what the answer is just yet, if there even is one, but I suppose I will figure it out.
(I’m gonna open comments on this because I want to hear what you have to say about How Much You Need to Know or What You Want to Hear From Me, but I’m gonna strongly suggest that your personal opinion on our current political situation is better addressed elsewhere. Thanks.)
Building on his walk-and-talk video from a couple of days ago, Jamelle Bouie writes about two of the easiest things to understand about Donald Trump. 1. The way in which “his every executive function exists to satisfy his ego”:
One immediate response to all of this is to say that Trump is operating according to some higher-level political and ideological perspective. And there is a cottage industry of observers who have given themselves the unenviable task of transmuting the president’s tics and utterances into something like a calculated strategy — an intellectually defensible set of doctrines rather than the thoughtless patter of an outer-borough confidence man.
But this has always strained credulity. To ask anyone, for instance, to treat the president’s display of childish pique opposite Zelensky in the Oval Office as some return to Teddy Rooseveltian great-power realism — as opposed to the embarrassing tantrum of a grade-school bully — is to demand that readers administer a self-lobotomy.
2. His desire for revenge:
If this is his psychological state, then it stands to reason that Trump would want revenge against the public that denied him a second term as much as he wants revenge against the officials who have tried to make him answer for his illegal actions.
It is hard to describe Trump’s first month and a half in office as something other than a retribution campaign against the American people.
As I wrote a few days ago about Trump’s Oval Office ambush of Zelenskyy:
It occurs to me after reading about the meeting that Trump’s actions here are partially motivated by a desire for personal retribution against Zelenskyy for not helping him smear Biden in 2019. Zelenskyy told Trump no and Trump wants revenge — and he’s gonna turn his back on Ukraine and Europe to get it.
This is a great post from Mike Masnick about why Techdirt is writing more or less full-time about the Trump regime’s attack on democracy: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not).
I agree with every word of it. One of the points he makes is that media outlets like Techdirt (and Wired and 404 Media, etc) and reporters like Masnick that cover tech and the law are uniquely positioned to understand what has been going on, particularly w/r/t to Musk’s seizure of the government’s computer systems:
This is the kind of thing tech and law reporters spot immediately, because we’ve seen this all play out before. When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point. It’s about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.
This is why it’s been the tech and legal press that have been putting in the work, getting the scoops, and highlighting what’s actually going on, rather than just regurgitation of administration propaganda without context or analysis (which hasn’t stopped the administration from punishing them).
I’m not a legal expert or a reporter, but I have been covering & writing about technology for almost 30 years and when I saw what Musk was doing (in conjunction with Trump’s EOs and what Project 2025 promised), I recognized exactly what was going on and started to cover it almost exclusively:
I keep hearing people saying this is a five-alarm fire but I feel like it’s a 500-alarm fire…we need metaphorical fire trucks coming from thousands of miles away to fight this blaze.
Masnick’s other main point is even closer to my heart:
When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.
We’ve always covered the intersection of technology, innovation, and policy (27+ years and counting). Sometimes that meant writing about patents or copyright, sometimes about content moderation, sometimes about privacy. But what happens when the fundamental systems that make all of those conversations possible start breaking down? When the people dismantling those systems aren’t even pretending to replace them with something better?
This x 10000. Like Masnick, I’ve gotten lots of feedback about my pivot to covering the coup, the overwhelming majority of it supportive — even the people who have told me they need to tap out from reading (I totally get it!) are generally approving. But there have been a few disapprovals as well, in the vein of “shut up and dribble” or “keep politics out of it” — which I also understand. To an extent. They want the Other Stuff back, the art and beauty and laughter and distraction, and for me to cool it with the politics.
But echoing Masnick, I believe that covering the rapid disassembly of American democracy is not some separate thing from the Other Stuff and never has been. The reason I have been able to write freely about those things for the last 27 years is because the US has had a relatively stable democracy1 under which people feel free to innovate, create art, take risks, and be themselves. Those things become much more difficult under fascist and autocratic rule. In a recent piece, Masha Gessen describes how autocracy stifles creativity:
Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.
I’m covering politics in this particular moment *because* the actions of the Trump administration are threatening all of that Other Stuff, because I want to be able to go back to covering design & photography & movies & science & food & travel & cities & all the cool things humans can do, and because I want my kids and everyone else’s kids to live in a stable, free society where they can make art, pursue scientific truth, be freely gay or trans, have health care, be able to have families, have a place to live, and, if they want to, write about frivolities on their websites. All of that becomes much more difficult if Trump/Musk get their way, and if I can help push back on their efforts in some small way with this platform that I have, I’m gonna do it. ✊✌️
From Angry Staffer on Bluesky on the Trump/Vance/Zelenskyy meeting:
The public nature of the meltdown amplifies the embarrassment. Unlike past Oval Office tensions — like Nixon’s private rants or Clinton’s discreet scandals — this clash unfolded live before cameras, capturing every raised voice and pointed finger.
The world watched as Trump interrupted Zelenskyy’s attempts to discuss Russia’s broken agreements, dismissing him with, “You’ve done a lot of talking,” and Vance chimed in with, “Have you said thank you once?”
The optics were disastrous: a U.S. administration humiliating an ally fighting for survival, all while the Ukrainian ambassador sat with her head in her hands.
This wasn’t a leaked transcript or a hushed rumor; it was a global spectacle, branding the U.S. as impulsive and unstatesmanlike.
Historically, Oval Office embarrassments — like Reagan’s “bombing Russia” quip or Bush’s awkward Merkel shoulder rub — pale in comparison. Those were gaffes, fleeting and unintentional. This was deliberate and sustained, a tag-team assault on a guest that undermined America’s moral authority.
Zelenskyy came seeking security guarantees and a minerals deal, not a lecture on gratitude. Instead, Trump and Vance turned what was supposed to be an olive branch into a cudgel, canceling a joint press conference and effectively kicking him out of the White House.
The message to our allies is chilling: U.S. support comes with a loyalty test, administered publicly and punitively.
America First inexorably drifts towards America Alone. We saw this last night, as world leaders rallied behind Zelenskyy, with figures like the U.K.s Ed Davey labeling it “thuggery.”
America Alone. That really sums up America’s current foreign policy. Trump is remolding the United States in his own image — bigoted, confrontational, erratic, reactionary, greedy, belligerent, vindictive, petty, friendless, authoritarian — and he won’t be content until the US is as lonely and isolated as he is.
Good news: at least for now, Lucy Welch remains employed by Sugarbush. From the Boston Globe (archive):
In a statement to the Globe, Sugarbush spokesperson John Bleh said the resort respects “the voice and opinion” of its employees but “determined that the snow report was not the appropriate medium to share that information.”
He would not comment on whether Welch had faced disciplinary action but said she “remains a member of the snow reporting team.”
JD Vance visited Vermont this weekend and skied at Sugarbush; Welch wrote the widely shared snow report for the resort that, in direct and plain language, detailed her distaste for the administration that Vance represents. Bill McKibben called Welch “a hero for the moment” — here’s a portion of her missive:
I am really scared for our future. Acting like nothing is happening here feels way scarier than losing my job. I want to have kids one day, and I want to teach them to ski. The policies and ideals of the current Administration, however, are not conducive to either of these things, because, at least how things look now, I’d never be able to afford a good life for a child anyway, and snow will be a thing of Vermont history. So please, for the sake of our future shredders: Be Better Here. It has truly been a pleasure writing your morning snow reports — I hope this one sticks with you. With love, peace, and hope, Lucy Welch
Judging from the comments on Sugarbush’s most recent Instagram photo and other social media platforms, Welch has achieved the status of folk hero in the state. Well deserved, IMO. (thx, caroline)
Here’s a straightforward description of Trump’s “ambush” of Volodymyr Zelenskyy from Heather Cox Richardson:
Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office — his attendance at such an event was unusual — in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.
In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a “mob hit,” spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was “disrespectful” of Zelensky to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.
Unlike many media outlets reporting on this, Richardson ties this into a previous attempt by Trump to negotiate with Zelenskyy, which ended in Trump’s first impeachment:
Zelensky came across Trump’s radar screen when, in July 2019, Trump tried to force Zelensky to say he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden in order to smear Biden’s father Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Only after such an announcement, Trump said, would he deliver to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion.
Zelensky did not make the announcement. A whistleblower reported Trump’s phone call, leading to a congressional investigation that in turn led to Trump’s first impeachment. Schiff led the House’s impeachment team.
Talking Points Memo similarly did not mince words: Trump And Vance Ambush Zelensky In Prelude To Betrayal.
President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance moved to betray a key U.S. ally that has lost hundreds of thousands of people in fending off a Russian invasion on Friday, taunting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at an Oval Office meeting after spending weeks trying to undermine the bilateral relationship.
The Oval Office blowup, in which Trump and Vance berated Zelensky as ungrateful while dismissing the prospect that Russian President Vladimir Putin might renege on a potential ceasefire agreement, is a culmination in a weeks-long campaign to choreograph an end to U.S. support for Ukraine.
It occurs to me after reading about the meeting that Trump’s actions here are partially motivated by a desire for personal retribution against Zelenskyy for not helping him smear Biden in 2019. Zelenskyy told Trump no and Trump wants revenge — and he’s gonna turn his back on Ukraine and Europe to get it.
Older posts
Socials & More