It’s not customary for the President to speak at the Department of Justice, which seeks a measure of independence, but Trump is not a traditionalist. He spoke today at the DOJ, whined about how unfairly he had been treated (by clipping and hiding top secret documents and inspiring an insurrection to overturn the election), and railed against those who had prosecuted him. It was typical Trump: aggrieved, bitter, self-pitying, angry.
He said that his courtroom opponents were “scum,” the judges were “corrupt,” and the prosecutors “deranged.”
He said the people who did this to him are “bad people,” and they should be imprisoned.
Trump vowed to “remake the agency and retaliate against his enemies.”
He is unhinged, deranged, vindictive, and we are in deep trouble.
A prominent diplomat lost his job because of a comment about Trump. He said out loud what most of us have known for years: Trump doesn’t know much about history. His world is centered on himself and his giant ego. Whenever he refers to events that preceded his own life, he draws a blank. One well-known example was his reference to famed 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass as “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” It was obvious that he had no idea who Douglass was. What made it even more embarrassing was that he was speaking to his African-American supporters at a breakfast honoring Black History month. They knew who Frederick Douglass was.
New Zealand has fired its most senior envoy to the United Kingdom over remarks that questioned US President Donald Trump’s grasp of history.
At an event in London on Tuesday, High Commissioner Phil Goff compared efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine to the 1938 Munich Agreement, which allowed Adolf Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia.
Mr Goff recalled how Sir Winston Churchill had criticised the agreement, then said of the US leader: “President Trump has restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office. But do you think he really understands history?”
His comments were “deeply disappointing” and made his position “untenable”, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters said.
He contrasted Trump with Churchill who, while estranged from the British government, spoke against the Munich Agreement as he saw it as a surrender to Nazi Germany’s threats.
Mr Goff quoted how Churchill had rebuked then UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain: “You had the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, yet you will have war.”
Peters said Mr Goff’s views did not represent those of the New Zealand government…
Former Prime Minister Helen Clark was among those who criticised Mr Goff’s sacking, saying it was backed by a “very thin excuse”.
“I have been at Munich Security Conference recently where many draw parallels between Munich 1938 and US actions now,” she wrote in a post on X.
It’s Black History Month. Ignore the fact that this annual tribute to the achievements and culture of African-Americans has been stripped of recognition by the federal government since the inauguration of the worst President in our history. Trump thinks that the nation was greatest when it was ruled by straight white men, and everyone else was submissive. I don’t work for him, so here is a tribute to two pioneering Black women. It was posted by CBS News, which is also not covered by Trump’s racist war on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
NEW YORK – A peaceful playground in Williamsburg bears the name of Sarah J. S. Tompkins Garnet. Two miles away in DUMBO is a park named after Susan Smith McKinney Steward. These are not the only places that bear their names — a school in Fort Greene and another in Prospect Heights are also named after them.
Dr. McKinney Steward specialized in childhood disease, co-founded a hospital and, later in life, ventured out West with her second husband, Theophilus Gould Steward, a U.S. Army Buffalo Soldier of the first all-Black Army regiment.
Her great-granddaughter is the late actress Ellen Holly, America’s first Black soap opera star who died in 2023.
“Its very special when someone recognizes your work,” Holly said in a 2004 interview recognizing her contribution to the history of TV.
Both sisters were also involved in the Women’s Suffrage movement and helped create the Equal Suffrage League, which worked to abolish race and gender discrimination in the late 1880s.
“Once abolition was achieved, a lot of those allies kind of went away. And you had women standing there asking, ‘well, what about us? ‘So women like Sarah and Susan took it upon themselves to take up the mantle for Women’s Suffrage,” Robbins explains.
Among the idyllic hills of Brooklyn’s historic Green-wood Cemetery are two graves, steps away from each other — the resting places of both sisters who desired to educate and heal their community.
You may recall that the Wall Street Journal published an article about Marlo Elez, the 25-year-old whiz kid who made racist tweets, deleted them, then resigned after they went public. Elez is or was the senior member of the DOGE team that has been scooping up government records.
Musk conducted a poll on Twitter, asking whether the mildest member of his DOGE team should be rehired.
On Friday morning, Musk posted a poll to X, asking his followers if DOGE should rehire the “staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym.” Within hours, it had amassed more than 200,000 votes, almost 80% in favor of bringing Elez back.
Musk is likely to rehire Marko.
Some of Marlo’s tweets were extremely prejudicial towards Indians, because they get great jobs in Silicon Valley.
I wonder what JD Vance’s wife thinks of Elez. She is of Indian heritage. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, like Vance. I wonder if she likes the racist crowd he runs with.
It’s time to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s reputation. True, he had a bunch of inept burglars break into the Denocratic National Committee’s headquarters. True, he had an enemies’ list. True, he appointed an ally to lead the Justice Department.
Nixon resigned before he could be impeached. Republicans in Congress were as angry as Democrats.
Nixon had a sense of shame. He resigned rather than be impeached. Trump has no sense of shame.
But all that pales compared to what is happening now. Trump has nominated a long list of completely unqualified people to run major Departments of the federal government. He has started a purge of the FBI, intending to oust anyone who participated in investigating him or the January 6 insurrection.
He has given free access to Elon Musk to enter every Department, copy its files, and fire any career employee who stands in his way.
Bill Kristol, once a conservative stalwart and editor of The Weekly Standard, now writes for The Bulwark, which sees Trump as the sociopath he is.
In disregard of the rule of law, he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation . . . in violation of his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Article II, section 5, of the Articles of Impeachment Adopted by the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, July 27, 1974
Half a century ago Congress, the courts, other key institutions within and outside of the government, and the American public, faced an assault launched by President Richard Nixon and his henchmen to the constitutional order and the rule of law.
They defeated it.
Today, we face a crisis greater than Watergate.
Are we up to dealing with it?
We’re going to find out.
The crisis is multi-faceted and fast-moving. President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk—nominated for no federal office, employed by no federal agency, accountable to no one—are racing on several fronts to undermine laws, procedures, and norms that would constrain their arbitrary exercise of power. But the assault on the rule of law seems centered on the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It began with the nomination of Trump apparatchik and defender of the January 6th rioters Kash Patel to be FBI director. Patel tried to reassure Senators during his confirmation hearing last Thursday that “all FBI employees will be protected from political retribution.”
But the next day, Emil Bove, Trump’s former defense lawyer, who is now acting deputy attorney general and in charge of the Justice Department, ordered the removal of at least six top FBI career executives. Bove also requested the names of all FBI agents who worked on January 6th cases.
All seemed on track for Trump’s efforts to purge the agency and remake it in his own image.
But FBI officials may not permit their agency to go gentle into the dictatorial night.
Over the weekend, in a blizzard of activity (helpful reporting can be found here, and here, and here), FBI officials moved to resist the attempted coup.
Though he had carried out the order to decapitate the bureau’s top executives the day before, on Friday acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll reportedly refused to agree to fire certain agents involved with January 6th cases, and was trying to block a mass purge of such agents. In a message to staff Saturday, Driscoll reminded FBI agents of their rights to “due process and review in accordance with existing policy and law,” and emphasized “That process and our intent to follow it have not changed.”
The FBI Agents Association sent a memo to employees over the weekend to remind them of their civil service protections. The memo urged them not to resign or to offer to resign, and recommended that agents respond to one question in the survey they’ve been instructed to answer: “I have been told I am ‘required to respond’ to this survey, without being afforded appropriate time to research my answers, speak with others, speak with counsel or other representation.”
And in a remarkable letter, obtained by The Bulwark, the president of the Society of Former FBI Agents—a group that seeks to stay out of politics—said the following:
The obvious disruption to FBI operations cannot be overstated with the forced retirement of the Director, Deputy Director, and now all five Executive Assistant Directors. Add in the immediate removal of a number of SACs [Special Agents in Charge] and the requests for lists of investigative personnel assigned to specific investigations and you know from your experience that extreme disruption is occurring to the FBI—at a time when the terrorist threat around the world has never been greater.
Then on Sunday the top agent at the FBI’s New York field office, James Dennehy, wrote in an email to his staff: “Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy. . . . Time for me to dig in.”
It’s surely time for many others to dig in. Especially the United States Congress, which authorizes FBI activities, appropriates its funds, and before whom Kash Patel’s nomination is pending.
It’s pointless to ask President Trump to recall the oath he took two weeks ago, to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
But members of Congress also take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” As it was fifty years ago, so it is today: The fact that the Constitution’s enemies now include the president of the United States does not relieve members of Congress of their responsibility to that oath.
Scott Maxwell, opinion writer for The Orlando Sentinel, points out a glaring example of double standards of justice: Matt Gaetz and anyone else charged with the same behavior. Matt Gaetz got away with behavior that would land anyone else in jail. It is astonishing that Trump thought he was the right person to hold the highest position in the Justice department.
Maxwell writes:
By now, most of you have probably heard about the U.S. House report on the behavior and actions of former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz.
If you haven’t actually read the full report, I’d encourage you to do so.
The descriptions of drug- and sex-fueled parties seem like something you’d expect in a tabloid report about Charlie Sheen — not an American lawmaker recently nominated to be this country’s attorney general.
But the most important thing to know about this report is that House investigators concluded that Gaetz repeatedly broke the law.
The report mentioned “illicit drug use” a half-dozen times and said there was “substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz met with women who were paid for sex and/or drugs” on “at least 20 occasions.”
It cited testimony that “Victim A recalled receiving $400 in cash from Representative Gaetz … which she understood to be payment for sex. At the time, she had just completed her junior year of high school.”
The report’s conclusion: “… there was substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”
Maybe none of this surprises you.
What should outrage you, though, is that virtually all of this behavior — including multiple accusations of law-breaking — was greeted with a collective shrug by Florida law enforcement.
I know it’s tempting to consider this story just another report about slimy behavior from another slimy politician. But I’d encourage you to look at this report in terms of how justice is generally doled out in this state and country — with powerful and connected people getting a pass while we throw the book at low-level offenders.
In fact, I’d like to juxtapose the Gaetz report to another Florida case I wrote about just two weeks ago in a column titled: “Prison for poor addicts. Deals for wealthy crooks. Twisted ‘justice’ ”
That piece featured a federal judge from Orlando who was incredulous that federal mandatory-minimum sentencing laws required him to send a homeless drug addict to prison for five years for taking $30 from a man who asked him to deliver a package of drugs.
Judge Roy “Skip” Dalton argued that this destitute man of the streets with no history of drug dealing needed treatment for his addiction, not five years in prison. Dalton said a lengthy prison sentence wouldn’t make the community any safer, wouldn’t help the man with his addiction and would cost taxpayers gobs of money.
The justification for tough sentences is supposedly that lawbreakers deserve no mercy or sympathy — unless you’re a member of Congress.
Or a fraud-committing CEO.
Or the kid whose parents cut big campaign checks.
The reality is that this country has two systems of “justice” — one for the powerful and privileged and one for everyone else.
Politicians and law enforcement love to talk about how they’re “tough on crime” — until they or their friends are involved.
Need proof? Consider the long list of lame excuses by Florida law enforcement agencies for why they didn’t pursue charges against Gaetz.
Remember: The House report said that Gaetz “Violated State Laws Related to Sexual Misconduct” and “Used Illegal Drugs” — with some of those alleged activities taking place in Seminole County at the home of former legislator-turned-lobbyist Chris Dorworth.
But when the Orlando Sentinel asked state and local law-enforcement agencies why they didn’t do anything, they merely made excuses and pointed fingers.
Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office said local police or FDLE should’ve handled things.
The FDLE wouldn’t answer questions.
And the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office said that no one came to them with allegations and that they thought the feds were on the case.
I’ve seen less buck-passing at the U.S. Mint.
Imagine how ridiculous it would sound if you heard that chorus of excuses from authorities for some street-level criminal:
We thought the other guys were handling this. This isn’t our job. Nobody directly complained to us about these activities (that were widely documented in the media).
Also, it’s worth noting that none of these investigative agencies said they didn’t think crimes were committed — just that they didn’t think they were the ones who should be doling out justice.
For his part, Gaetz, who comes from an extremely wealthy family in Florida’s panhandle, has denied any legal wrongdoing.
“My 30’s were an era of working very hard — and playing hard too,” he said. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”
Way back in his 30s. Gaetz is 42.
Most Floridians would be quaking in their flip-flops if Congress released a report that said they had broken all kinds of laws. Not Gaetz. He’s already back on Twitter (X), promoting Bitcoin and fuming about immigration proposals.
Why? Because Gaetz knows how justice in this country works.
If you’re poor and lacking connections, you’ll be sent to prison for small-time crimes. But if you’re powerful and connected, you’ll get a pass — and maybe a talk-show deal or Cabinet nomination.
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025.
President-elect Donald J. Trump and his family on Friday started selling a cryptocurrency token featuring an image of Mr. Trump drawn from the July assassination attempt, a potentially lucrative new business that ethics experts assailed as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.
Disclosed just days before his second inauguration, the venture is the latest in a series of moves by Mr. Trump that blur the line between his government role and the continued effort by his family to profit from his power and global fame. It is yet another sign that the Trump family will be much less hesitant in this second term to bend or breach traditional ethical boundaries.
Mr. Trump himself announced the launch of his new business on Friday night on his social media platform, in between announcements about filling key federal government posts. He is calling the token $Trump, selling it with the slogan, “Join the Trump Community. This is History in the Making!”
The venture was organized by CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, which already has been selling an array of other kinds of merchandise like Trump-branded sneakers, fragrances and even digital trading cards.
But this newest venture brings Mr. Trump and his family directly into the world of selling cryptocurrency, which is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Trump recently disclosed he intended to name a cryptocurrency advocate as S.E.C. chairman.
A disclosure on the website selling the tokens says that CIC Digital and its affiliates own 80 percent of the supply of the new Trump tokens that will be released gradually over the coming three years and that they will be paid “trading revenue” as the tokens are sold.
The move by Mr. Trump and his family was immediately condemned by ethics lawyers who said they could not recall a more explicit profiteering effort by an incoming president.
“It is literally cashing in on the presidency — creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office” said Adav Noti, executive director of Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit ethics group. “It is beyond unprecedented.”
Trump’s greed cannot be restrained. And there are no boundaries because the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that he has “absolute immunity” while he is president.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, no longer writes a column for The New York Times. Instead, he has a blog on Substack where he writes whatever strikes his fancy.
In this post, he ponders what billionaires want. Why aren’t they satisfied to have “only” $500 million? Or “only” $1 billion? I always thought that their insatiable desire for more stemmed from competitiveness, from obeisance to the maxim “He who dies with the most toys wins,” attributed to magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes. Who has the most houses? Who has the biggest superyacht? Who has a yacht to follow his superyacht?
Krugman has a different take.
He writes:
Today’s newsletter will be a bit different from my usual. In general, I do data-driven posts, mainly about economics — and that will remain the norm. But right now, as some of the worst people in America are about to take power, doesn’t feel like the time for charts from FRED. So this entry will be informal and impressionistic, based partly on things I’ve seen, partly on speculation.
So: Much of the political and business world is prostrating itself at the feet of the least-qualified man, morally and intellectually, ever to occupy the White House.
It’s understandable if not excusable why many of those declaring fealty are doing so. If you look at what has happened to Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger you realize that Republican politicians who stand up to Trump destroy their political careers and put themselves at real personal risk. Many businesspeople — including media owners — fear that they will suffer monetarily if they cross the new regime.
But what’s truly extraordinary is the way billionaires have been abasing themselves before Donald Trump, a spectacle highlighted by Ann Telnaes’s now-famous cartoon — the one Jeff Bezos spiked, causing her to quit the Washington Post:
PS: I strongly urge everyone to show Ann Telnaes some love by reading her Substack, getting a paid subscription if you can afford it.
Why is this self-owning by billionaires so extraordinary? Well, ask yourself: What’s the point of being rich?
Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires.
To the extent that there’s a valid reason for accumulating a very large fortune, I’d say that it involves freedom, the ability to live your life more or less however you want. Indeed, one definition of true wealth is having “fuck you money” — enough money to walk away from unpleasant situations or distasteful individuals without suffering a big decline in your living standards. And some very wealthy men — most obviously Mark Cuban, but I’d at least tentatively include Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — do seem to exhibit the kind of independence wealth gives you if you choose to exercise it.
The likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, however, surely have that kind of money, yet they’re prostrating themselves before Trump. They aren’t stupid; they have to know what kind of person Trump is and understand — whether or not they admit it to themselves — the humiliating nature of their behavior. So why do they do it?
The answer, I believe, is that many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”
So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration. Read Ross Douthat’s interview with Marc Andreessen, in which the tech bro explains why he has turned hard right. Andreessen says that it’s not about the money, and I believe him. What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.
Of course, Trump’s victory won’t do anything to restore the adulation he misses, so I can confidently predict that Andreesen and others in his set will keep on whining — that there will be so much whining that we’ll get sick of whining. Actually I already am.
Or consider the Elon Musk gaming scandal. Many people in the gaming world, which is huge, believe that Musk, who claims to be an avid and expert gamer, has been faking it, either by having someone else play for him or by using a more skilled player’s account.
It’s a deeply embarrassing story, if true. And while I don’t know anything about gaming, the accusations seem credible — and completely consistent with Musk’s behavior in areas I do know something about. His attempts to pose as a budget guru and a macroeconomist have, for those familiar with even the most basic facts, been as cringeworthy as his apparent fakery in video games — although for sheer cringe value nothing matches Mark Zuckerberg’s talk about “masculine energy.”
What the gaming story suggests is something I already suspected: Musk’s frenetic interventions on behalf of right-wing, racist politicians around the world are doing real harm — he definitely helped Trump win, his influence is one reason horrible people like Pete Hegseth will probably be confirmed for office, and sooner or later Musk will end up inspiring violence. But they shouldn’t be seen as a coherent political strategy. They are, instead, efforts to fill the emptiness inside.
But what about Bezos and Zuckerberg? Both made bids to define themselves as more than their wealth, Bezos by buying the Washington Post, Zuckerberg by unveiling Threads as an alternative to Nazified Twitter. But both lost their nerve. Bezos, initially seen as the Post’s savior, ended up trashing its reputation (and readership) with his political cowardice. Zuckerberg implemented an algorithm that made Threads uncontroversial and hence irrelevant, then lobbied hard and successfully to block efforts to protect children from the clear harm social media does.
So now they are defined by their wealth and nothing more, which I believe explains their submission to Trump. Trump would probably be able to damage their businesses if they didn’t bend the knee, but that would still leave them immensely wealthy, just possibly no longer among the wealthiest men on the planet.
The problem for them is that their status as the richest of the rich is, in ego terms, all they have left, which leaves them far more vulnerable than they would be if they were just run-of-the-mill billionaires.
So as I said in this post’s subtitle, fuck-you money has become fuck-me money. And the cravenness of billionaires will have dire consequences, not just for their reputations, but for the rest of us.
Doktor Zoom writes on the blog Wonkette. This is an excellent commentary on Biden’s farewell address.
President Biden made mistakes. He was not perfect. But he survived an unprecedented barrage of defamation from the Republications, who did everything possible to portray him as a criminal and to destroy his son. Never mind that the Republican’ star witness against the Bidens was an FBI informant who falsely claimed that Biden and Hunter took millions in bribes, and eventually confessed to being a Russian plant; he was recently sentenced to six years in prison.
Biden is a good man. He is a man with a heart. He is deeply empathetic. We can’t say the same for the felon who succeeds him.
And, despite razor-thin numbers in both houses of Congress, he managed somehow to pass a remarkable lot of legislation that will rebuild our nation’s infrastructure, create good jobs, attract new industries, revive technology manufacturing, and address climate change. Trump inherits a thriving economy–the best in the world–and will claim credit for it. In the 48 months of Biden’s time in office, there was job growth inbb by every single month. Furthermore, he relieved the debts of millions of students, prioritizing those who got debt forgiveness in return for public service. The Republicans accused him of buying votes, but they lied: Biden continued to forgive college debt after the election.
And that Norman Rockwell painting portrayed in the post? It hangs in Biden’s White House. You can be sure it will be moved to storage on Monday.
Doktor Zoom writes:
….Biden made an explicit parallel to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, which warned about the threat of the “military-industrial complex” that nevertheless still has a stranglehold on our economy and politics in a “disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Today, Biden said, we should be wary of the “potential rise of a tech-industrial complex”:
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
He didn’t name Donald Trump explicitly, just some of those forces that helped him retake power, and which threaten to help Trump and his billionaire buddies undo democracy.
Biden also offered some very concrete steps that might help rein in the destructive forces, although the chances they’ll be enacted during the tenure of the Lord of Misrule seem slim. He started with the easy stuff that won’t happen under Trump.
“We must reform the tax code. Not by giving the biggest tax cuts to billionaires, but by making them begin to pay their fair share.
“We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaign contributions — we need to get it out of our politics.”
Then it was on to three ideas that will almost certainly have to wait until we bury Trumpism, at the very least.
“We need to enact an 18-year time limit, term limit […] and the strongest ethics reforms for our Supreme Court. We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they are in the Congress. We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president, no president is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office. The president’s power is … not absolute. And it shouldn’t be.”
OK, maybe the second one, the ban on members of Congress trading stocks, has some ghost of a chance; it also wouldn’t really do anything to keep Trump in check, though it’s certainly a general good-government idea. Maybe Biden threw it in for the sake of parallelism, to call for reforms in all three branches of government.
Letting the super-wealthy run things, Biden reminded us, is a recipe not just for oligarchy, but for despair: If everyone knows the system is rigged, we all too often give up, or lash out in violence, neither of which is good for democracy. He offered as a hopeful metaphor an image from a 1946 Norman Rockwell painting that hangs in the White House, showing a crew of workers cleaning the torch on the Statue of Liberty, so its “rays of light could reach out as far as possible.” Keeping that torch lit is the work we all have to do as citizens. And while Biden didn’t mention this detail, do keep in mind that Liberty is not enlightening the world with a damn tiki torch, either.
The bald guy with the pipe is a caricature of Rockwell. Wikipedia notes that ‘The inclusion of a non-white figure working with whites, apparently only noticed in 2011, contravened a Saturday Evening Post policy of only showing people of ethnicity in subservient roles.’ Darn that DEI!
Biden closed with a rather remarkable passing of the torch, not so much to the incoming wrecking crew, but to the only people who can stop those bastards: Us.
“I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands — a nation where the strength of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure. Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith. I love America. You love it, too.”
What a contrast to the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, who blithely called America a “shining city on a hill” because it’s so plainly the bestest place possible. (As Sarah Vowell reminds us, adding “shining” was a sunny perversion of the original Puritan metaphor’s dour intent, which warned that everyone would see our sins, like Abu Ghraib).
But America isn’t a self-illuminating beacon of virtue that’s virtuous just because it’s America. Instead, Biden argues, the light of freedom requires constant maintenance and renewal — and it only keeps shining if we do the hard, even risky work of participatory democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 