In the post at 9 a.m today, Joyce Vance included a photo of a T-shirt of Trump and Vance, billed as “the Outlaw and the Hillbilly.” Now, that’s clever marketing!
An Outlaw is often an admirable figure in westerns. He’s a folk hero. He’s the guy who goes up against the Establishment. He’s the Sundance Kid, he’s Robin Hood, he’s the handsome guy who gets the girl, he’s a lot of characters who live on the fringes of society and stand up for the little guy.
This is not Donald Trump. He is reverse Robin Hood. He steals from the poor and fattens the bank accounts of the rich. He doesn’t defend the helpless damsel, he sexually asssults her, then laughs about it and defames her. He does not stand outside society on its fringes, he owns the biggest, gaudiest mansion and installs solid gold toilet seats. Far from being handsome and buff, he is an obese old man with thinning hair and sagging jowls. He is a coward who dodged the draft five times yet pretends to be a tough guy.
As for J.D. Vance, he was once a hillbilly but that was long, long ago. Now he plays a hillbilly. He is a graduate of Yale Law School who made millions of dollars in the financial sector, where his patron was Peter Thiel, the woman-hating billionaire.
Not an Outlaw! Just a womanizing convicted felon who is a superb liar, braggart, and bully.
Not a Hillbilly! Just another far-cat who attached himself to super-rich patrons.
Trump passed one piece of legislation in his first term: a big tax cut for his billionaire buddies, corporations, and himself.
We know what his priorities are. Ego. Money. Power. Control.
He’s already forgotten about the people who voted for him. They can’t do anything for him any more. He won’t lower the price of food or gasoline or home insurance. He might take away their Social Security or Medicaid. He might cut programs they rely on.
He will take care of the people rich enough to belong to Mar-a-Lago.
Joyce Vance is a veteran federal prosecutor; she was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern district of Alabama from 2009-2017. She writes a blog called “Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance.” She usually writes about the law, the justice system, and Trump’s efforts to avoid accountability for his misdeeds. But in this post, she addresses the root cause of his appeal: low-information voters who are hoodwinked by his lies and believe he will fight for them. Ha. Not funny.
She writes:
It’s no wonder that Project 2025 calls for putting an end to the Department of Education. Trump’s electoral success depended on so-called low-information voters, members of the electorate who couldn’t or didn’t distinguish between the tough talk and tough guy image the candidate portrayed and the reality of the policies that come with his win. That’s often true for MAGA candidates, who are inexplicably able to attract the voters who are harmed by the policies they subsequently pass, as with tax cuts for the extremely wealthy and the working-class voters who didn’t benefit from them, but made them possible.
The Washington Post had this story today about the hopes of low-income voters who went for Trump in 2024, like a single mom who said she sometimes has to choose between buying toilet paper and milk and told reporters, “He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich … I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.” So far, that’s not looking good.
This very predictable reporting about voters suffering from buyers’ remorse is emerging even before Trump takes office. These people hope he won’t do exactly what he said he would during the campaign and has been focused on during his transition with programs like the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s DOGE—cut government spending that they depend on. Whether it’s low-income people, mixed-status immigrant families, people who rely on Social Security, or parents with immune-compromised kids who rely on immunized classrooms, people voted against their own self-interest and are now facing that reality.
There are no do-overs in presidential elections. Successful disinformation campaigns or campaigns where image trumps consequences have lasting effects.
But spin, or disinformation—however you want to characterize it—designed to redirect voters away from focusing on bad facts about candidates can work, and this past election proved it. This T-shirt ad that the algorithm fed me earlier this week is an example of how Trump’s criminal conviction was sold to voters: the mythical outlaw, not the corrupt criminal. It’s hard to believe Americans fell for that, but they did, giving Trump a pass and letting him cultivate an image that was one step further out there than Sarah Palin’s maverick.
Voters who lack the backbone of a solid education in civics can be manipulated. That takes us to Trump’s plans for the Department of Education.
Stepping on education and staunching the flow of information is a key goal for any authoritarian. Remember when Trump told an evangelical group during the campaign that if they voted in 2024 it would be the last time they had to vote? That’s something that Americans, hopefully, will not fall for, because the 2026 midterms will be key. If guardrails are going to be rebuilt, that’s where an important part of it will happen. And while we’re all burned out from the last election, this next one will matter; we will need to reengage, because a big Democratic win could staunch the bleeding from unfettered acquiescence by the legislative branch to Trump, who currently commands majorities in both chambers. That means the provision of accurate information and accurate analysis of that information to voters who will put it to use is important. But what does that look like in a country that voted for Trump?
One thing that is clear from the ease with which Trump seems to have stripped so many voters of their common sense is the need to restore civics education in this country. That’s a long-term plan and a big topic that we need to take on over time, but it’s not too early for us to begin to think about what we can do in the coming year ahead of the midterms. For one thing, if it’s right for you, even if it’s a stretch, consider running or seeking appointment to a school board. Republicans got the jump on Democrats in this arena. It’s time to catch up. Or, if that’s not in your lane, make the time to show up at school board meetings and demand civics education in our schools. Progress in this area will take time, but we can all set a good example and encourage people around us to do a better job of understanding what matters in government. Ironically, if 2017 is any indication, people caught off guard (although who knows how) by some of the worst excesses Trump is likely to engage in will be ready to be better informed and reengage in democracy. Capturing that moment will be important.
One of the goals of Project 2025 is terminating the Department of Education. There is growing Republican support for that plan at the state level by leaders who want to restore state control (much like conservatives sought restoration of abortion policy to the hands of red state officials in Dobbs). Enter Trump’s nominee to head the Department, Linda McMahon, who ran the Small Business Administration (SBA) for him from 2017 to 2019.
Trump’s appointment of the professional wrestling magnate has drawn little comment as the media has focused on Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, and others. Suffice it to say she does not appear to possess much of a background in public education. She was on the Connecticut Board of Education for one year, but there has been reporting she received that appointment after lying about having a degree in education. When that report came to light while McMahon was running, unsuccessfully, for a Connecticut Senate seat, she said that “she mistakenly thought her degree was in education because she did a semester of student teaching, and that she had written to the governor’s office the previous year to correct the error after another newspaper noticed the mistake.” (I, too, did some student teaching in college, but I was always clear my degree was in political science and international relations.)
McMahon is a longtime Trump ally and financial backer, apparently key qualifications for the job. After two years at the SBA, she stepped aside to run Trump’s America First Action PAC. Other qualifications: Yahoo News reported that “Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary was once pile-driven by a 7ft wrestler and feigned being drugged unconscious while her husband cheated on her.” Yahoo went on to recount that “Mr. Trump served as a sponsor and host for WWE events in Atlantic City in the late 1980s and years later appeared in the ring himself, when he took a razor to the head of Ms. McMahon’s scandal-ridden husband, Vince, as the wrestling boss wailed. In 2013, WWE inducted Mr. Trump into its hall of fame.”
The National Education Association ran an editorial opposing McMahon’s confirmation. They called her “unqualified” and wrote that she “spent years pushing policies that would defund and destroy public schools.” That sounds like a good fit if your agenda involves destroying the Department of Education. Start at the top.
NEA President Becky Pringle said, “McMahon’s only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools, where 90% of students – and 95% of students with disabilities – learn, and give them to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools.”
So while we begin to think about ways to repair democracy, medium-term goals like winning midterm elections, and long-term goals like restoring civics education, spare a moment for some short-term plans: write to your senators about McMahon’s nomination. It’s flying largely under the radar screen, and it should not be. Do not obey in advance, and do not make it easy for Trump to destroy democratic institutions like the Department of Education with the complicity of your state and federal elected officials. We have a lot of work to do when it comes to public education. We have to insist that free, publicly funded, high-quality education is available to every child. Our engagement as citizens is everything. Let’s get to work.
Allison Gill is a Navy veteran, a comedian, a podcaster, and a blogger. Her blog “Mueller, She Wrote,” was launched at the beginning of that long-ago investigation of Trump’s connections to Russia. This post appeared on her blog:
I’m not a lawyer, but usually, when the Supreme Court hears a case, they are supposed to rule on that specific case. Yet somehow, in two crucial cases about holding Donald Trump accountable for insurrection, the corrupt court went out of its way to decide on questions not before it, and create “a rule for the ages,” as Neil Gorsuch put it during oral arguments this past spring.
The first bomb they dropped to destroy accountability for Trump was their ruling overturning the Colorado Supreme Court on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The justices decided 9-0 that Colorado could not keep a federal candidate off the state ballot – but a 5-4 majority took it a step further by deciding that Section 3 of the 14th amendment is not self-executing; meaning Congress has to first pass legislation disqualifying Trump. An idea so wrong that even Amy Coney Barrett joined the liberal justices and objected to that part of the ruling in her concurrence.
The second bomb they dropped was the immunity ruling. Not only did they grant Trump presumptive immunity in the case before them, but they granted all presidents presumptive immunity, and took it a step further by disqualifying official acts from being used as evidence to prosecute unofficial acts.
But that’s not all! Rather than deciding which acts in the Trump case were subject to immunity, they kicked it back down to the lower court, teeing up a second interlocutory appeal on whatever the lower court ruled. That effectively added another year to the delay. Additionally, it would give the corrupt court another swing at the DoJ case on the second appeal, where I imagine they’d rip it apart once and for all. When all was said and done, they decided that they themselves would be the ultimate arbiter of rulings on official acts for criminal presidents while adding ridiculously long pre-trial appeals to the process.
That’s nothing compared to the official acts evidence part of the ruling. Again – so bad and so wrong that Amy Coney Barrett joined the liberal justices to disagree. The gist is this: let’s say you want to prosecute a president after he leaves office for accepting a million dollar bribe in exchange for an ambassadorship. And let’s say you have emails between the president and the potential ambassador explicitly stating “I will give you this ambassadorship in exchange for a million dollars.” This Supreme Court ruling says you can’t mention the appointment of the ambassador (the quo) while trying to prosecute the bribe (the quid). Absolutely bonkers.
These two rulings are the reason we can’t have nice things. That and Mitch McConnell failing to convict Trump of Insurrection after his impeachment. These decisions are the reasons Trump has not been held accountable. All because a bought-and-paid-for supreme court, funded by dark money with corporate interests before the court, needed to protect Trump from prosecution and accountability.
Were it not for the immunity ruling, Donald would have faced trial for his role in the insurrection in March of 2024. Would a conviction have made a difference in the election given he was already a 34-count convicted felon? I don’t know, but we would have had a trial were it not for the Supreme Court. The immunity ruling also contained a permission slip from Clarence Thomas in his concurrence for Aileen Cannon to dismiss the documents case, opining apropos of NOTHING that Jack Smith was probably appointed and funded improperly.
POOF. Both DoJ trials were scrapped from the pre-election calendar. But even if Trump had lost the election, there’d be a second interlocutory appeal of Judge Chutkan’s immunity determinations that would have gone all the way back up to the Supreme Court – adding at least a year to the trial calendar. Would the corrupt court have left Judge Chutkan’s ruling in place, allowing the case to go to trial? If you believe that, I have a luxury motor coach to sell you.
People have been trying to convince me that if Trump were indicted sooner, he would have gone to trial before the election and wouldn’t have been re-elected. For that to be true, you’d have to convince me that the dark money funded oligarchs on the Supreme Court would have been cool one time and allowed the trial to happen. You’d also have to convince me that people are fine electing a man convicted of 34 felonies, but not a man convicted of 38 felonies. I have my doubts.
Regardless, I will forever blame the billionaire-funded Supreme Court. They are part of the oligarchy, and were installed to dismantle democracy.
Several days ago, Elon Musk tweeted his endorsement of an extremist political party in Germany, the AfD, which is known for its xenophobic and hateful views. A number of pundits said he had thrown his support to a Neo-Nazi party. J.D. Vance soon added his praise of the extremist party.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a scholar of extremism, wrote at the MSNBC website, about the alarm bells that Musk and Vance set off.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk posted on X, prompting backlash from conservative and mainstream German leaders and the global Jewish community about a key Trump adviser’s endorsement of a party that has flirted with Nazi and white supremacist slogans and espoused dehumanizing and hateful rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims. In the wake of the criticism, Musk doubled down, writing the next day that “AfD is the only hope for Germany.”
Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions.
Vance’s more tacit endorsement for AfD came in the form of a post responding to claims that AfD is dangerous. “It’s so dangerous for people to control their borders,” Vance tweeted sarcastically Saturday, implying support for the party’s anti-immigration positions. “So so dangerous. The dangerous level is off the charts.”
Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions. The AfD has called for mass deportations, argued that children with disabilities should be removed from regular schools, and runs social media ads blaming immigrants for crimeand sexual violence. One anti-immigrant ad run by the AfD showed the belly of a pregnant white woman with the phrase “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.” Another campaign billboard used a 19th century painting of a slave market — depicting a nude, white woman having her teeth inspected by turban-clad, brown men — to warn that Europe could become “Eurabia,” a reference to a conspiracy theory favored by white supremacists.
To finish reading, open the link.
Trump’s advisers are showing their hand awfully early. Know them by those they admire.
Paul Cobaugh retired from the military after a 19-year career. He served in Special Operations and received multiple awards for his service. He focused on mitigating adversarial influence and advancing US objectives by way of influence. Throughout his career he has focused on the centrality of influence in modern conflict whether it be from extremist organisations or state actors employing influence against the US and our Allies. He writes at “Truth About Threats,” where this post appeared. He writes here about the dangers of ignoring history. To read the complete post, open the link.
Cobaugh writes:
As we get ready to transition into 2025 and a new Trump administration, let’s take a good look at the sheer, staggering idiocy of his campaign pledge to start a global tariff war. We’ve been here before and it was called the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It was a primary factor that led us into a Great Depression, a World War and the most disruptive period in modern US and world history.
For those that pay attention, history is often painfully instructive if left unheeded. It wasn’t just Tariffs in the US of the 1930s that laid devastating economic pain onto the backs of America’s working classes. Unregulated and poorly regulated greed contributed their fair share as well. The 1930s all together have some pronounced parallels to the America we now live in. Tariff wars are but one of those parallels. All combined, those same parallels represent acute threats to not only working-class Americans but to our republic itself.
During the Roaring Twenties, post WW I, America was prosperous, hopeful and on the rise. The Stock Market crash of 1929 and the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act brought all of this to an end, not only for the US but the globe. The Great Depression ushered in the 1940s , which saw the globe fully immersed in WW II and the beginning of the Cold War. Twenty years of intense global upheaval literally shook the world. Nothing would ever be the same again. If you consider the Great Depression as a precursor to WW II, then Smoot-Hawley was a primary cause of the Great Depression. Let that sink in.
The political landscape of the 1930s, was as diverse and active as at any time in our history. The Great Depression spawned a very large number of progressive movements and even a fairly strong socialist movement, both in pursuit of protecting the workers who had suffered badly from a lack of employment.
Today, diverse and contrary political movements include many as fascist as those of Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan, or as forward-leaning in support of American workers as today’s progressives. Unlike the 1930s, today’s political landscape does not include the record high 900,000 enrolled in Socialist movements that we saw up until 1932. By the late 1930s, the socialists were mostly gone but the American far-right movements lasted up until the day that America declared war on Germany, post Pearl Harbor. Today, the fascists still exist in the form of MAGA and related movements, while that socialism is still mostly absent from any significance on the American political landscape. Those on today’s political spectrum that work to protect workers almost always come from the political left, progressive or otherwise.
Smoot-Hawley was a bill designed in theory to protect American agriculture from foreign competitors. In the end, it hurt both deeply. This protectionist measure also played out against a backdrop of a deep American commitment to isolationism, as the rest of the world slowly but unstoppably marched towards a world war.
The Hawley- Smoot Tariff and
the Great Depression, 1928– 1932
In the 1920s, the focus of trade policy shifted from protecting manufacturing to protecting agriculture. Congress struggled to fi nd the right
way to assist farmers and relieve farm distress, turning to a tariff revision
after President Coolidge vetoed price- support legislation. The resulting
Hawley- Smoot tariff of 1930 proved to be the most controversial piece of
trade legislation since the Tariff of Abominations in 1828. The subject of
heated debate during its difficult passage through Congress, the legislation
helped push the average tariff on dutiable imports to near- record levels just
as the economy was sliding into the Great Depression. The early 1930s
saw an unprecedented contraction of world trade, during which time many
other countries retaliated against the United States and significantly increased their own trade barriers. The Hawley- Smoot tariff had far- reaching
consequences and it marked the last time that Congress ever set duties in
the entire tariff schedule.
- Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy
- This PDF is a selection from a published volume from the National Bureau
of Economic Research
- Volume Author/Editor: Douglas A. Irwin
- November 2017
The bottom line to Smoot-Hawley and presumably President-elect Trump’s threats against our neighbors and most other nations, is that tariffs start tariff wars, in which there are no winners. Also, it is working Americans that do the overwhelming majority of the suffering. At the moment, toxic oligarchy is keeping the prices of goods and services artificially inflated. No, not inflation, but just plain and simple, old-fashioned price-gouging.
There is legitimate fear of Trump’s approach to the economy. First of all, he’s inheriting President Biden’s hot, well-grounded economy, just like he did in 2016 from the Obama administration. He has already told us that he doesn’t think it will be easy to lower consumer prices and as we all have learned during his 2018 losing trade war with China, it is the American people who pay the cost of tariffs.
Introduction to the research from the National Bureau of Economic Research
“The ghost of Smoot-Hawley seems to haunt President Trump.”1 As fears of a trade war between the U.S. and China grew after the U.S. presidential election of 2016, many commentators drew precisely this link between the events of 1930 and today. And the consensus was that the trade wars of the 1930s were an ominous portent of what might await the world if Donald Trump’s protectionist impulses were not checked
The conclusion of the research from the National Bureau of Economic Research
President Trump’s recent use of tariffs as a “weapon” to cudgel other nations into changing their trade policies has renewed interest in understanding what trade wars are and how they affect flows of goods and services across borders. As our research indicates, the current trade war was by no means the first one initiated by the U.S. The passage of Smoot-Hawley led to direct retaliation by important U.S. trade partners. Countries responded to its passage by imposing tariffs 24 targeting U.S. exports. Although protectionism was on the rise in the 1930s, we collect novel data and design empirical tests which show that retaliation against Smoot-Hawley was distinctive: it involved policies specifically directed at the U.S., the initial provocateur.
Using a new data set on quarterly bilateral trade flows as well as detailed information on who filed official protests during the legislative debate over the Tariff Act of 1930 and who (later) retaliated, gravity model estimates demonstrate that U.S. exports were severely affected by the Smoot-Hawley trade war. Even after controlling for financial crises, the effects of the global decline in aggregate demand, and the overall decline in partner countries’ imports from all sources, U.S. exports fell substantially. If they had just fallen in line with the overall reduction in imports in each country, we would have found no effect: instead, they fell disproportionately, by between 15 and 33 percent, depending on the specification and the countries involved. By examining the effects for protestors as well as retaliators, we are able to more extensively assess the retaliation against Smoot-Hawley: this was not limited to those countries traditionally regarded as “retaliators”.
Product-level regression estimates confirm that retaliators were strategic in their response to Smoot-Hawley (as they have been in more recent trade wars), choosing to bludgeon key U.S. exports differentially. Fast-growing U.S. exports of automobiles appear to have been particularly targeted by U.S. trade partners. Our results suggest that MFN constraints did not prevent countries from effectively retaliating. In addition to strategically targeted tariffs, retaliation involved such non-tariff measures as quotas, boycotts and increased sales resistance to American goods. Our results show that this retaliation was extremely effective in reducing U.S. exports. In March 2018, Peter Navarro famously predicted that no country would retaliate against U.S. tariffs. 29 The evidence from the 1930s suggests it is a mistake, even for a country as wealthy and powerful as the United States, to assume that it can engage in a trade war with impunity.
- THE SMOOT-HAWLEY TRADE WAR- NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
- Kris James Mitchener
- Kirsten Wandschneider
- Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke
- March 2021
Most families do not have room in their budgets to fight trade wars that make the oligarchical elite, wealthier, while their budget becomes overburdened because of tariffs. This is why tariffs are often described as a “tax” on consumers.
Right after the election, Trump announced that he had chosen Matt Gaetz, Congressman from Florida, as his choice to be Attorney General of the United States. The AG is the highest ranking officer of the law in the nation.
Faced with strong opposition, including enough Republican votes to stop him, Gaetz withdrew from the nomination.
(CNN) — The House Ethics Committee found evidence that former Rep. Matt Gaetz paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex or drugs on at least 20 occasions, including paying a 17-year-old girl for sex in 2017, according to a final draft of the panel’s report on the Florida Republican, obtained by CNN.
The committee concluded in its bombshell document that Gaetz violated Florida state laws, including the state’s statutory rape law, as the GOP-led panel chose to take the rare step of releasing a report about a former member who resigned from Congress.
“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” panel investigators wrote.
The panel investigated transactions Gaetz personally made, often using PayPal or Venmo, to more than a dozen women during his time in Congress, according to the report. Investigators also focused on a 2018 trip to the Bahamas – which they said “violated the House gift rule” – during which he “engaged in sexual activity” with multiple women, including one who described the trip itself as “the payment” for sex on the trip. On the same trip, he also took ecstasy, one woman on the trip told the committee.
Ben Meiselas of the Meidas Touch blog had the rare opportunity to interview President Joe Biden in the White House. Please watch the interview.
What comes through is that President Biden is thoughtful, well-informed, and fully functional. This interview should shut up the hyenas who claim that he is senile. Trumper recently wrote on this blog that Biden was a “vegetable.” So many lies, so much hatred for a man who has tried to solve problems and help people.
The other thing that shines through is that Joe Biden is a good man. A good man. He has tried to do what is best for the American people. He has a conscience. He has a soul. He is decent. His heart is filled with kindness, not hate. He is not angry. He does not have an enemies’ list. What he does have is a long list of legislative accomplishments.
Could anyone say the same about the other guy? No.
Andru Volinsky lives in New Hampshire, where he has been active in politics and protecting public schools. He served on the state’s Executive Council, he successfully litigated a challenge to the state’s system for funding public schoools. He ran for Governor in 2020 and unfortunately was not elected. He writes here about the risks that America’s immigrant children face today.
His article was posted on the blog of the Network for Public Education.
Andru Volinsky alerts us to one of the other threats to education that may be coming for immigrant children.
School children who cannot prove they are legally in the US may soon be threatened with exclusion from public schools. Since 1982, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Plyler v. Doe, public schools have been required to accept children who immigrate to the US, regardless of their legal status. The Plyer opinion, however, was issued by a deeply divided court (five different justices wrote opinions) with only a bare majority deciding in favor of the school children. And now, much like the Roe v. Wade abortion decision, the Plyler decision is under attack by right-wing extremists. Texas governor Gregg Abbott has publicly challenged the decision and it appears there is an organized effort to overturn the right of immigrant children to attend public schools.
Earlier this year, the Saugus, MA School Committee adopted stringent proof of legal residency requirements for its school children shortly after Massachusetts governor Maura Healey announced a state of emergency concerning Massachusetts’ over 5000 recent immigrants, many of whom were from Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Saugus is a town of about 30,000 residents located just outside of Boston. The immigrants from these three nations were legally admitted to the US under a Biden administration special humanitarian parole program adopted in 2023.
Legislators in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas recently also considered legislation to either explicitly bar children from attending public school if they cannot prove they are legally in the US or to require extensive proof of legal residency that can then give local officials excuse not to admit students. The Saugus School Committee is reported to have deployed this tactic to delay admission of a six-year-old girl from Nicaragua for six months.
According to a Pew study released in July 2024, the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States was 11.0 million in 2022, the most recent year available. About 850,000 of these immigrants were children under 18.
About 4.4 million U.S.-born children under 18 live with an unauthorized immigrant parent. More than eight million workers in the US are unauthorized immigrants. Only 5 percent of these unauthorized workers are single persons without children. The remainder are heads of families most of which are of mixed legality of their immigration status.
If we exclude children from public schools because of their immigration status, how can we expect them to become “good citizens?”
Jamelle Bouie is a regular opinion columnist for The New York Times. He is an original thinker. He doesn’t run with the pundit crowd. I subscribe to his newsletter as part of my New York Times subscription.
I am grateful for his reminder that the party in power usually loses seats in the midterm. If that happens in 2026, Trump’s ability to do crazy things will be limited. But he does have time in the coming year to deliver another tax cut for billionaires.
He writes:
The annals of American political history are littered with the remains of once-great presidential mandates.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s smashing 1936 re-election did not, to give a famous example, give him the leverage he needed to expand the Supreme Court, handing his White House a painful defeat. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society generated immense conservative opposition, and his momentum could not survive the 1966 Republican wave. Ronald Reagan was stymied by Democratic gains in the first midterm elections of his presidency. Bill Clinton was famously cut down to size by the Newt Gingrich revolution of 1994. And Barack Obama was shellacked by Tea Party extremists in 2010.
“I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” George W. Bush declared in 2004 after he became the first Republican to win re-election with a majority of the popular vote since Reagan. By the summer of 2005, Bush’s approval had crashed on the shoals of a failed effort to privatize Social Security. In the next year’s elections, Republicans lost control of Congress.
There is no evidence that Donald Trump is immune to this dynamic. Just the opposite: His first term was a case study in the perils of presidential ambition. Not only were his most expansive plans met with swift opposition, but also it is fair to say that he failed, flailed and faltered through the first two years of his administration, culminating in a disastrous midterm defeat.
Trump has even bigger plans for his second term: mass deportations, across-the-board tariffs and a campaign of terror and intimidation directed at his political enemies. To win election, however, he promised something a bit more modest: that he would substantially lower the cost of living. According to Sam Woodward in USA Today:
“Prices will come down,” Trump also told rallygoers during a speech in August. “You just watch. They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.”
Now Trump says this might not be possible. Asked by Time magazine if he thinks his presidency would be a failure if the price of groceries did not come down, he said: “I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”
At the same time that Trump won’t commit to a key promise of his campaign, he is gearing up to deliver on mass deportations, a policy position that many voters seem to treat as just blather.
When you take all of this together with policies — such as large tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China — that are more likely to increase than lower the costs of most goods and services, you have a recipe for exactly the kind of backlash that eventually hobbles most occupants of the Oval Office.
The American public is exceptionally fickle and prone to sharp reactions against whoever occupies the White House. It wants change but continuity, for things to go in a new direction but to stay mostly the same. It does not always reward good policy, but it usually punishes broken promises and perceived radicalism from either party.
Ignore for a moment the high likelihood of chaos and dysfunction from a Trump administration staffed with dilettantes, ideologues and former TV personalities. It appears that what Trump intends to do, come January, is break his most popular promises and embrace the most radical parts of his agenda.
I can’t end this without conceding the real possibility that the basic feedback mechanisms of American politics are broken. It is possible that none of this matters and that voters will reward Trump — or at least not punish him — regardless of what he does. It’s a reasonable view, given the reality of the present situation.
And yet the 2024 presidential election was a close contest. The voting public is almost equally divided between the two parties, so Trump has little room for error if he hopes to impose his will on the federal government and make his plans reality.
If Americans are as fickle as they’ve been, then Trump’s second honeymoon might be over even before it really begins.
Writing at Wonkette, Gary Legum describes what Elon Musk will get for the $250 million he invested in Trump’s campaign. He may seek waivers from regulations, he may seek contracts. Trump is very grateful. No one, to our knowledge, has ever given so much money to a Presidential campaign. What will he get in return?
Legum writes:
Compare and contrast if you will the two senators from the great state of Connecticut.
The first senator, Richard Blumenthal, spent time this week rallying support for his Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) by verbally fellating sentient staph infection Elon Musk, calling him “the foremost champion of free speech in the tech industry.” This was a naked attempt to get Musk to try and influence the other tech bros infesting the incoming administration to support the bill even though any sort of regulation of the Internet goes against their core beliefs. Unless the regulations somehow bother liberals, in which case they get a thumbs-up.
Thus did Blumenthal violate yr Wonkette’s rule about lending any legitimacy to the right-wing billionaire who just spent a quarter of a billion dollars to buy the election for the other party and has been rewarded with the highest of high-level access to the incoming president. We don’t particularly care about the cause one is fellating in support of, although KOSA is a problematic bill that no one should want passed. But that’s a whole other post.
Now consider Connecticut’s other senator, Chris Murphy. Thursday night on MSNBC, Murphy told Alex Wagner in no uncertain terms that America is about to become the sort of oligarchy represented by Musk’s ascent to Trump’s inner circle that we used to be able to at least pretend was beneath us:
“What it means is a handful of really rich people run the government, and they steal from ordinary people using their access to government in order to make themselves and their families even richer.”
Whoa, that’s no way to get invited to the DOGE Christmas party, Senator.
Murphy’s description really applies to how our government has been for some decades, the difference being that now we have an incoming president and administration that are not bothering to pretend otherwise. But okay, we won’t split hairs with Murphy. We are where we are, so any tiny voices in opposition to the coming nightmare are appreciated.
Anyway, Murphy got us thinking that you really have to hand it to the sentient staph infection. Musk spent a quarter of a billion dollars buying himself a president who will roll over at the soft snap of the billionaire’s doughy fingers, and it has paid off again and again and again. And Sweet Potato Suharto’s coronation isn’t even for another five weeks.
A quarter of a billion dollars. Thanks a pantsload, Anthony Kennedy and the Supreme(ly Stupid) Court.
The latest atrocity to benefit Musk is a report on Friday that the incoming administration may drop the federal government’s car crash reporting rules. See, Tesla has a minor problem, in that it has had to report over 1,500 crashes to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, partly because the automated-driving systems that are supposed to set the cars apart from normie vehicles don’t work very well, turning them into fiery mobile deathtraps and causing untold misery and suffering to not just crash victims but their families as well.
Musk probably doesn’t believe this, but pain and suffering by humans is in fact bad. It’s true! Just ask us!
Diane Ravitch's blog 