This statement was released by the White House today after Trump’s swearing in. Be sure to read the last two pledges:
The first promises to restore the names of Confederate leaders to federal facilities like military bases where they had been changed. They were changed to acknowledge that Confederate leaders were traitors. Trump will once again recognize them as heroes. Time will tell if he intends to re-erect the Confederate statues that were removed. For those that were destroyed, he could commission replacements.
The second pledges to remove any recognition of transgender people. Under Trump, they no longer exist.
. MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN
President Trump will take bold action to secure our border and protect American communities. This includes ending Biden’s catch-and-release policies, reinstating Remain in Mexico, building the wall, ending asylum for illegal border crossers, cracking down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhancing vetting and screening of aliens.
President Trump’s deportation operation will address the record border crossings of criminal aliens under the prior administration.
The President is suspending refugee resettlement, after communities were forced to house large and unsustainable populations of migrants, straining community safety and resources.
The Armed Forces, including the National Guard, will engage in border security, which is national security, and will be deployed to the border to assist existing law enforcement personnel.
President Trump will begin the process of designating cartels, including the dangerous Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations and use the Alien Enemies Act to remove them.
The Department of Justice will seek the death penalty as the appropriate punishment for heinous crimes against humanity, including those who kill law enforcement officers and illegal migrants who maim and murder Americans.
MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AND ENERGY DOMINANT AGAIN
The President will unleash American energy by ending Biden’s policies of climate extremism, streamlining permitting, and reviewing for rescission all regulations that impose undue burdens on energy production and use, including mining and processing of non-fuel minerals.
President Trump’s energy actions empower consumer choice in vehicles, showerheads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs and dishwashers.
President Trump will declare an energy emergency and use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure.
President Trump’s energy policies will end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.
President Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.
President Trump will announce the America First Trade Policy.
America will no longer be beholden to foreign organizations for our national tax policy, which punishes American businesses.
DRAIN THE SWAMP
The President will usher a Golden Age for America by reforming and improving the government bureaucracy to work for the American people. He will freeze bureaucrat hiring except in essential areas to end the onslaught of useless and overpaid DEI activists buried into the federal workforce. He will pause burdensome and radical regulations not yet in effect that Biden announced.
President Trump is announcing an unprecedented slate of executive orders for rescission.
President Trump is planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.
President Trump is taking swift action to end the weaponization of government against political rivals and ordering all document retention as required by law. President Trump is also ending the unconstitutional censorship by the federal government. No longer will government employees pick and require the erasure of entirely true speech.
On the President’s direction, the State Department will have an America-First foreign policy.
BRING BACK AMERICAN VALUES
The President will establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology.
American landmarks will be named to appropriately honor our Nation’s history.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—District of Columbia officials confirmed on Tuesday that they are constructing a fence around a federal government building to keep a sexual predator 500 feet away from the public.
With a Monday deadline for completion of the barrier fast approaching, the calls to “build the wall” have only grown louder.
“Once we got official word last week that the felon in question would not be going to prison, we immediately got to work on the fence,” D.C. spokesman Harland Dorrinson said. “We’re doing everything we can to keep people safe.”
D.C. residents praised the decision to build the fence, but warned that one is still needed around the Supreme Court.
Greg Olear is simply amazing. Read the post here and perhaps you will agree. He is wise, smart, learned, insightful, and inspiring. I know of no other writer who weaves together politics, literature, and history as seamlessly as Olear. He writes at Substack and charges no fee.
Dear Reader,
The great British historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote an indispensable series of books in which he divides the 20 decades after the French Revolution into historical “ages.” The period from the 1789 storming of the Bastille to the uprisings sweeping across Europe in 1848 he termed the Age of Revolution. Eighteen forty-eight until the end of the Great Boom circa 1875 is the Age of Capital. The Age of Empire spanned from the mid-1870s until the start of the Great War in 1914. And the “short twentieth century,” a term he coined, was dubbed the Age of Extremes, and ran from the assassination of the archduke until 1991.
Ever since I discovered his books in 2012, the year of his death, I’ve often wondered what Hobsbawm would have called the fifth historical “age”—the one that began in 1991. That was the year of the first Gulf War, and the banishment from Saudi Arabia of Osama bin Laden that kickstarted his Al Qaeda movement; the mysterious death of Robert Maxwell—friend to the British royal family, mentor to Jeffrey Epstein, business partner of the Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich, and Israeli spy—who fell off his yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands; the repeal of the apartheid laws in South Africa, where Errol Musk made his fortune; the rollout of the WorldWideWeb; and the breakup of the Soviet Union—on Christmas, no less, capitalism’s holiest of holy days.
Today, a mere 24 hours and change before we hand the federal government off to a hateful confederacy of Nazis, mobsters, Opus Dei weirdos, white Christian nationalists, and billionaire dorks, I think I know not only the name of the period after the Age of Extremes, but also its termination date. As I type this, we are living in the last few hours of the Age of Unreality. It ends tomorrow at noon.
Something else happened in 1991, you see—something that likely eluded Eric Hobsbawm. Producers at MTV were developing a TV show that would begin filming in February of 1992. It was called The Real World: New York. It was the first reality TV show—or, at least, the seminal reality TV show of the subsequent reality TV explosion. Riding the reality TV wave was a British producer named Mark Burnett, who would give us Survivor in 2000, and, four years later, what wound up being the most historically significant reality TV show of all time, The Apprentice.
Although I confess to having enjoyed a few seasons of The Surreal Life, back when our eldest son was a baby—Flavor Flav does not disappoint!—I have never liked reality TV shows, encouraging, as they often do, the very worst of human behavior. I don’t like meanness. I don’t like ruthlessness. I don’t like watching anyone being voted off the island. I don’t like when people are fired. I don’t like talentless humans. I don’t like Kardashians. Most of all, I don’t like the unscripted-but-very-much-scripted fluff that has replaced actual shows written by actual writers. By encouraging us to believe in a heavily-retouched fictional universe presented as the real world—or, I suppose, The Real World—reality TV has left us more susceptible to Russian disinformation, to deep fakes, to conspiracy theories, to manufactured media narratives, to tech-bro charlatans, to pseudo-scientific arguments against vaccines, and to mendacious politicians who have supercharged lying to a form of warfare.
I have often grumbled, half in jest, that reality TV would bring about the end of Western civilization. I did not think it would also bring about the end of Western democracy. To paraphrase Don DeLillo: Reality TV has given us Joe Rogan; that alone warrants its doom.
(Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Freddie Mercury died in—when else?—1991.)
One of the most significant, world-altering events in this Age of Unreality was, of course, 9/11. In response to the WTC attacks, the FBI shifted its focus from transnational organized crime, which was already operating in the United States and growing more powerful by the day—a genuine threat to our society—to Islamic extremist terrorism, which involved not very many crazy people mostly living in caves far, far away from New York. In response to 9/11, we have to subject ourselves to TSA search before boarding an airplane. In response to 9/11, Bush and Cheney launched a long and expensive war on Saddam Hussein, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while simultaneously cutting taxes for their wealthy benefactors—two actions that, in tandem, starved the U.S. treasury and put the country so far into the red that it may never recover. In Britain, meanwhile, Tony Blair’s blind loyalty to Bush—a foreshadowing, perhaps, of Joe Biden’s blind loyalty to Bibi Netanyahu—paved the way for BREXIT and the series of hapless prime ministers that followed the disastrous decision to LEAVE.
Five days after 9/11, Anthony Lane, the New Yorker’s savagely witty film critic, published what remains one of the finest pieces of writing on the attacks, a short essay called “This Is Not a Movie.” I go back and revisit it every once in a while, when the mood strikes me. Reading it now, I see that Lane perfectly articulates the paradox of the Age of Unreality, the uneasy blur between fact and fiction, when he comments on “the degree to which people saw—literally saw, and are continuing to see, as it airs in unforgiving repeats—that day”—that is, September 11, 2001—“as a movie.” He notes that the elapsed time between the initial hijackings and the collapse of the north tower was “a little over two hours;” the length of a summer blockbuster disaster film.
Lane writes:
We are talking…of the indulgence that will always be extended to an epoch blessed with prosperity—one that has the leisure, and the cash, to indulge its fancies, not least the cheap thrill of pretending that the blessing could be wiped out. What happened on the morning of September 11th was that imaginations that had been schooled in the comedy of apocalypse were forced to reconsider the same evidence as tragic. It was hard to make the switch; the fireball of impact was so precisely as it should be, and the breaking waves of dust that barrelled down the avenues were so absurdly recognizable—we have tasted them so frequently in other forms, such as water, flame, and Godzilla’s foot—that only those close enough to breathe the foulness into their lungs could truly measure the darkening day for what it was.
There are echoes of this in the fires that have ravaged Los Angeles. Looking at those horrific images, it is impossible not to describe the fiery scenes as something from a movie—or, rather, a limited series, because, unlike with 9/11, the L.A. fires did not confine themselves to a movie-length running time. They began last Tuesday, almost two full weeks ago, and are still ongoing. If 9/11 was, as Lane suggests, a disaster film come to life, the fires are a combination of disaster film and horror movie: not just the fires themselves but the hundred-mile-an-hour winds and the dread of the fires spreading. Only those close enough to breathe the foulness into their lungs could truly measure the darkening days for what they are. My heart breaks for everyone in L.A., even as I know I can never fully understand their ordeal.
The fires are not a movie, just like 9/11 was not a movie. The fires are all too real.
As a country, we have not even begun to comprehend the extent of the damage, or its impact on all those hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena and beyond, much less the effect the fires will have nationally, culturally, societally—not least because the recovery will ultimately be overseen by an incoming administration not much known for its compassion, its competence, or its love for Hollywood.
The last paragraph of Lane’s essay is achingly, hauntingly beautiful. Many, many people wrote about 9/11 in the days that followed it, and it always struck me as both unlikely and somehow appropriate that a film critic would offer the purest take:
To be forced to disdain the ideal in favor of the actual is never a pleasant process. Even at its worst, however, it can deliver a bitter redemption. We gazed upward, or at our TV screens, and we couldn’t believe our eyes; but maybe our eyes had been lied to for long enough. Thousands died on September 11th, and they died for real; but thousands died together, and therefore something lived. The most important, if distressing, images to emerge from those hours are not of the raging towers, or of the vacuum where they once stood; it is the shots of people falling from the ledges, and, in particular, of two people jumping in tandem. It is impossible to tell, from the blur, what age or sex these two are, nor does that matter. What matters is the one thing we can see for sure: they are falling hand in hand. Think of Philip Larkin’s poem about the stone figures carved on an English tomb, and the “sharp tender shock” of noticing that they are holding hands. The final line of the poem has become a celebrated condolence, and last Tuesday—in uncounted ways, in final phone calls, in the joined hands of that couple, in circumstances that Hollywood should no longer try to match—it was proved true all over again, and, in so doing, it calmly conquered the loathing and rage in which the crime was conceived. “What will survive of us is love.”
Larkin, the poet who wrote that line—and who is, like Lane, British—was not at all a sentimental sort. His stuff is gloomy, sourpuss, almost defeatist. Throughout his poems we see a struggle between, on the one hand, recognizing the futility of life, and on the other, being paralyzed by the fear of death. It is his poem “This Be The Verse,” about how our parents “fuck us up,” that the pub owner quotes, somewhat incongruously, in Ted Lasso:
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
Sunny stuff, right? Larkin’s entire worldview is neatly encapsulated in this line from “Aubade,” a title that indicates this is a poem about the dawn:
And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.
The antecedent of the “it” in the first line is “death.” But we may just as well substitute “Trump,” and the lines work just as well: the standing chill, the furnace-fear and the rage, the necessity of other people and a good stiff drink, the futility of courage.
The poem that Lane quotes is called “An Arundel Tomb.” At Arundel, a medieval British town, is the tomb of Richard FitzAlan, the tenth Earl of Arundel, who died in 1371, and that of his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster, who predeceased him by a few years. The tomb is capped by stone statues of the couple, who are, surprisingly, holding hands:
Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone,
Larkin, a dour librarian and bemoaner of the decline of civilization who seems not to have believed in love (even as he juggled three women for most of his adult life), calls bullshit on this romantic display:
They would not think to lie so long. Such faithfulness in effigy Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
In other words, while the holding of stony hands has stood the test of time, the love it represents was probably a figment of the artist’s rosy imagination. (Note the double meaning of “lie.”)
How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths Of time. . .
Until,
Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age. . . Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Larkin is saying that what the statues represent isn’t real—that our “almost-instinct” is to believe in the much-ballyhooed power of love, and that the “stone fidelity” of the earl and his wife is so compelling as to make said love-power “almost true.” Almost true is not true; almost true is AI true—a lie we want badly to believe in. The entire poem is him expressing his deep, nasty cynicism. The oft-quoted last line is intended to be ironic—a fitting epitaph for our Age of Unreality.
Even so, what survives of Larkin is “What will survive of us is love.” And I like to think, as Lane does, that, whatever the poet’s intention, the Arundel sentiment is real.
The Age of Unreality began in 1991, when all the ingredients of the historical cocktail were thrown into the shaker: the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Russian mafia, the ascendance of Jeffrey Epstein, the dawn of reality TV, the end of apartheid, and the last time that a coalition of Western democracies repulsed an attempt by a despot to invade a sovereign nation—thus upholding the tenets of the Westphalian order. Out of that cocktail shaker, cold as ice, was poured Jeffrey Epstein and Semion Mogilevich, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Tomorrow, that mindfuck age draws to a close, and a new one begins. What it has in store for us is anyone’s guess. Will the last barriers between fantasy and reality be worn away, or, as Lane poetically puts it, have our eyes been lied to for long enough? Will democracy really die, as the fascism scholars have been warning us for years, or will the Trump power-grab finally wake up the American people and restore our love of liberty? Will generative AI destroy all art, or will a new analog artistry emerge? What will happen to our beloved Hollywood, to which Trump has named meathead Sylvester Stallone, rightwing wacko Jon Voigt, and radical Catholic weirdo Mel Gibson his MAGA “ambassadors?”
I take some small solace in knowing that we’ve been here before. As Hobsbawm notes in The Age of Capital, the United States in the late nineteenth century—the America Trump wants us to return to—was marked by
the total absence of any kind of control over business dealings, however ruthless and crooked, and the really spectacular possibilities of corruption both national and local—especially in the post-Civil War years. There was indeed little that could be called government by European standards in the United States, and the scope for the powerful and unscrupulous rich was virtually unlimited. In fact, the phrase ‘robber baron’ should carry its accent on the second rather than the first word, for, as in a weak medieval kingdom, men could not look to the law but only to their own strength—and who were stronger in a capitalist society than the rich? The United States, alone among the bourgeois world, was a country of private justice and armed forces….
Our current crop of robber barons is orders of magnitude worse than its forebears—but maybe the abject awfulness of these despicable people will make their reigns shorter, their fall more humiliating, and their historical impact less profound.
Even so, for all my optimistic tendencies, I fear tomorrow as surely as Larkin feared death, which he describes as
The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
Death is permanent and absolute, but dictatorships are neither; moreover, Donald isn’t a dictator yet, and may well never be. Even as I have witnessed the poltroonish capitulation of our political leaders, our robber barons, our media figureheads, even our Snoop Doggs, I have faith that we will somehow find a better way, that we will repulse this ugly MAGA incursion, that the moral arc of the universe will bend towards justice, that the better angels of our nature will prevail. My faith will be tested, surely. But it will remain.
Nothing more true than this: What will survive of us is hope.
Heather Cox Richardson is wise not to put titles on her posts. They combine several topics. But this day’s posting has a common thread: the next four years will see a changed focus: from the public interest to private greed. Please read it all!
She writes:
Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.
The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.
“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”
The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers’ experience with surveillance pricing.
FTC commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report.
Matt Stoller of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working “to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power,” wrote that “[t]he antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over.”
Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere “for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment,” released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had “inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion,” “sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments, for misleading renters on junk fees,” and “forced health care private equity powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market.”
It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, “[l]eft a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and OpenAI,” said gig workers can’t be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer Cognosphere to pay a $20 million fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “sued Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by misleading consumers over savings accounts,” Stoller continued. It “forced Cash App purveyor Block…to give $120 million in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers,” “sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports,” ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victims’ fund for “failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports,” and ordered “Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers.”
The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued “seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage,” Stoller went on. It “sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions.”
“Honorary mention goes to [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights,’” Stoller concluded. He added more results to the list in his newsletter BIG.
Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning he appeared to have made more than $25 billion, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, “ethics experts assailed [the business] as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.”
Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told Lipton: “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. It is beyond unprecedented.” Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump’s obvious cashing-in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomaino posted: “Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it.”
Yesterday the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand over internal documents about the company’s algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation.
Today in Washington, D.C., the National Mall was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today’s protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall.
Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: “MAGA doesn’t realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years.”
Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance: his approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands.
Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand.
Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all “poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales” until further notice after officials found Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or bird flu, in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising—just as Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office.
There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the U.S. among humans who have caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $176 million that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July.
The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21 and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later.
Yellen reminded congressional leaders: “The debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past.” She added, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”
Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed, and managed quickly, and solutions will require expertise and political skill.
Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump’s people have been fighting with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump’s people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.
But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the “shock and awe” the administration wanted, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said the team was reconsidering it.
Heather Cox Richardson wrote the following brilliant article about the machinations of the Republican Party in North Carolina. Since winning control of the General Assembly (legislature) in 2010, the state GOP has gerrymandered Congressional districts and state districts to hold onto power. Democrats win statewide races, as they did in 2024, but the legislature strips the powers of the Governor and the state Attorney General.
It’s a shocking story .
She writes:
Almost ten weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and current Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general, and they broke the Republicans’ legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state supreme court.
Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice.
In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September’s Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from Stein and Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor and prohibited the attorney general from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support.
The law also radically changes the way the state conducts elections, giving a newly elected Republican state auditor power over the state’s election board and shortening the amount of time available for the counting of votes and for voters to fix issues on flagged ballots.
Outgoing governor Cooper vetoed the bill when it came to his desk, calling it a “sham” and “playing politics,” but the legislature repassed it over his veto. Now he and incoming governor Stein are suing over the law, saying it violates the separation of powers written into North Carolina’s constitution.
There is an important backstory to this power grab. North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In 2010, Republican operatives nationwide launched what they called Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take control of state legislatures across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census.
It worked. In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than 100 years. They promptly redrew the map of North Carolina’s districts so that the state’s congressional delegation went from a split of 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans in 2010 to a 9–4 split in favor of Republicans in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won over 80,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. By 2015 that split had increased to 10–3.
The same change showed in the state legislature. North Carolina’s House of Representatives has 120 seats; its Senate has 50 seats. In 2008, Democrats won the House with 55.14% of the vote to the Republicans’ 43.95%. And yet in 2012, with the new maps in place, Republicans won 77 seats to the Democrats’ 43. The North Carolina Senate saw a similar shift. In 2008, Democrats won 51.5% of the vote to the Republicans’ 47.4%, but in 2012, Republicans held 33 seats to the Democrats’ 17.
When they held majorities in both chambers, Democrats passed laws that made it easier to vote, and voter turnout had been increasing with more Black voters than white voters turning out in 2008 and 2012. But in 2012, Republicans used their new power to pass a sweeping new law that made it harder to vote.
When courts found those maps unconstitutional because of racial bias, the state legislature wrote a different map divided, members said, not according to race but according to political partisanship, despite the overlap between the two.
“I’m making clear that our intent is to use the political data we have to our partisan advantage,” said state representative David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting committee. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage of 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Lewis declared: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
That map, too, skewed representation. Although Democrats won a majority of votes for both the state House and the state Senate in 2018, Republicans held 66 out of 120 seats in the House and 29 of 50 seats in the Senate. Although they had lost the majority of the popular vote, Republican leaders claimed “a clear mandate” to advance their policies.
The fight over those maps went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in Rucho v. Common Cause that the federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs then sued under the state constitution, and in late 2019 a state appeals court agreed that the maps violated the constitution’s guarantee of free elections. A majority on the state supreme court agreed.
The court drew a new map that resulted in an even split again in the congressional delegation in 2022 (North Carolina picked up an additional representative after the 2020 census). But Republicans in that election won two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. In late spring 2022 the new right-wing majority said the state courts had no role in policing gerrymandering. The state legislature drew a new congressional map that snapped back to the old Republican advantage: in 2024, North Carolina sent to Congress 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.
But they also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the North Carolina Supreme Court, by 734 votes. Her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has refused to concede, even after the two recounts he requested confirmed her win. He is now focusing on getting election officials to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters, retroactively changing who can vote in North Carolina.
There has been a fight over whether the case should be heard in federal or state court; Griffin wants it in front of the state supreme court, which has a 5–2 majority of Republicans. Last Tuesday the state supreme court temporarily blocked the state elections board from certifying Riggs’s win while it hears arguments in the case.
As Will Doran of WRAL News explains, Republicans currently have a court majority, but three of the seats currently held by Republicans are on the ballot in 2028. Taking a seat away from Riggs would ensure Democrats could not flip the court, leaving a Republican majority in place for redistricting after the 2030 census.
The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives North Carolina an “F” for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making “vaccine harm” a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of antimigrant laws.
This rightward lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions, as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daly Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.
The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country’s politics than his time as a political leader in New York.
In the early 1800s, van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York’s 36 electoral votes—the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly—to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren’s focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial dominance—although he came from a family that enslaved its Black neighbors—but on money and power.
Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on party unity. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements in the state, recognizing that such improvements would disrupt the existing power structure by opening up new avenues for wealth. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1820, he used his machine to elect Andrew Jackson to the White House on a platform promising “reform” of the federal government calling for economic development, a government the Democrats claimed had fallen into the hands of the elite. Once in power, Jackson used the federal government to benefit the enslavers who dominated the southern states.
That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment. After the 1950s, as federal courts upheld the power of the federal government to regulate business and promote infrastructure projects that took open bids for contracts, they threatened to disrupt the economic power of traditional leaders. While state power reinforces social dominance as a few white men make laws for the majority of women and racial, gender, and religious minorities, it also concentrates economic power in the states, which in turn affects the nation.
When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” and when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone.
Sherrilyn Ifill is a law professor who holds an endowed chair at Howard University. She is a former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
In this post, she offers sage advice about how to recharge your batteries and re-engage in the struggle for a better society. She wrote this piece soon after the 2024 election. It’s good advice.
….But ours is a subtle strength Potent with centuries of yearning,
Of being kegged and shut away In dark forgotten places. We shall endure To steal your senses In that lonely twilight Of your winter’s grief.
-Pauli Murray, To the Oppressors (1939)
The truth is that things are going to get very bad. America has gone over the cliff’s edge. How hard we land in the ravine below remains to be seen. But we are one week in, and things are already quite dire. Trump’s first round of cabinet nominees, and his insistence that his picks be installed without a vote of Congress is a defining moment. It demonstrates that there will be no bottom with this Administration.
Donald Trump and his coterie of supporters are firmly in control of the most powerful and wealthy country in the world. And because they are in charge of this country – which perhaps undeservedly, has stood as an example throughout much of the world as a symbol of freedom, equality, ethics, the rule of law and democracy – other countries will fall in our wake.
I am saying this now because I have always tried to be honest in my writings and analysis about this country. I say all of this because I have been able over the years to encourage my clients, my colleagues, my staff, my family and community to believe that we can fight and win. I have infected other people with my unshakeable optimism about what we can accomplish to transform this country.
I am going to keep fighting. It’s what I do. But I do not want to lead you astray. Because I do think that many of us – especially those of us in communities likely to be targeted by this Administration – need to see this moment as one in which we are focused on surviving this difficult time. I have faced the fact that we will not be able to move much forward in the next few years. In fact, I expect things to become so dire over the next two years, that we will scarcely recognize the country we live in. I expect that fear and cruelty will become part of our daily diet. We will hear the frightening sound of silence, as those who speak out most boldly against the excesses of the incoming administration, against its policies, against Musk and against Russia, find themselves at cross-purposes with a vindictive and cruel administration with almost unimaginable power to control communications, law, and the sense of reality itself.
Perhaps it won’t be that bad. But we are here in some measure, because far too many failed to imagine that the worst could happen. I have written already about “the nadir,” and I believe we must face it.
And so, our goal now must be first and foremost to survive this dark period with as much of our values, dignity, integrity, work, financial stability and physical and mental health intact as possible. We must also work to protect our families and communities, and to hold in place our most trusted and needed institutions, a modicum of the rule of law, our constitutional commitment to equality and to free expression. As I have said in earlier pieces, this is “planting time.” Planting is work. That work must be aimed at building ideas, theories, paradigms, institutions, skills, practices, and alliances that we can seed now for a future harvest – a fulsome and lush democracy that will reflect the very best of us.
We are not “watching the Trump show” this time. We’ve seen it already. We can dip in every now and then, but we must not become paralyzed watching the train wreck. We will, of course, push back against injustice, and defend our rights and citizenship when necessary in the courts. We will demand that congressional representatives, our Governors and our Mayors, act to protect our democratic rights. Even when we know they will not stand up for what is right, we must not be silent. We must not make it easy for them to be cowards or to take our rights. We must still call, write and email our representatives and show up at town halls and meetings. Remember that those who have fought for us over these past years are tired too. Let them see us in these spaces and hear from us.
But our primary work must be first and foremost to work in our communities – both physical and ideological. To build them up and to share time and ideas with those committed to democracy and justice. We each need a curriculum of local service.
We also need a personal curriculum that will allow us to contribute to the building of the future we dream of for ourselves and our families. That means that our core work must be to commit during this time to do less watching, and more learning and more growing. We need to become better citizens for the democracy we want. That means we must dedicate time to expanding our thinking and our knowledge, and to building up our democratic imagination. That means our work is to imagine, to ally, to experiment, restore, befriend, study, read, write, serve, and create. Every one of us. Even as chaos swirls around us.
I encourage you to show your children and grandchildren real things – nature, animals, how things are built, how to cook from scratch. Teach them cursive writing, so that they have a signature all their own. Take them to live concerts and theater. Go on field trips. Infuse their lives with memories of things that are true and concrete.
If you teach, use primary documents in your teaching, take your students to historic sites, listen to audio of oral arguments and speeches so that they will feel confident in their understanding of history, and know that history was made by human beings not machines.
If you litigate, do it with the expectation that you will win. And act like it. Show out. Be excellent and remain confident. Those who can still feel shame – whether those at your opponents table or those on the bench – will feel it when you hold the standard high. And your clients will never forget it.
If you organize, never stop. Plant those seeds deep in our communities.
If you hold office. Hold it. Do not give up your power. Use your voice. Master every rule. Make a record. I repeat. Make a record–so that the truth might be known.
To protect ourselves and our loved ones, there are also pragmatic things we must do. I’ve thought of a few:
Save some cash. And keep enough in the house for gas and food for a week.
Let yourself imagine what you would do if you lost your job in terms of finding new employment, paying rent/mortgage for several months, and start building what you need to be able to meet that moment if it comes.
Get needed vaccinations in case new HHS policies result in changes or delays in their development or availability. Stock up on COVID tests, and get the most recent COVID booster. Purchase Plan B if it’s available in your area.
Think about tightening security on your electronic devices. Be more thoughtful about social media, and even return to making phone calls and writing letters in some instances. I know it’s old school, but actually memorize the phone numbers of at least two loved ones.
Gird yourself spiritually, through your faith or other meditative practices, as we are all likely to hear or confront many disturbing and ugly interactions. Experience art, go on walks, dance, play Spades, Dominoes, Scrabble. We need resilience.
Walk away when you need to walk away. Challenge when you need to. Try to always have back up.
Take the bystander training offered by groups https://righttobe.org/ so that when you see outrages committed against members of your community or against strangers, you will have practice in how you might intervene or respond.
Get an online subscription to a news service from another country so that you have a reliable sense of what’s going on in the world, and how this country is being perceived.
Are your taxes paid, or more importantly, filed?
Is your passport up-to-date?
If you have money to give – then give to your local library, the food pantry, homelessness services. But also give to cultural institutions. Get a library card and a membership to a museum. Give to organizations working to hold back the worst that this administration may dish out – the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, the National Women’s Law Center, and so many others.
I am going to write more in this space. I hope you’ll subscribe and even pay a nominal fee to sustain the writing. I’m right here, going through this with all of you. And for me there is beauty in our shared walk. Let’s do this together.
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.
For decades, The Washington Post has been one of the nation’s premier newspapers, widely admired for its fearless journalism. During the McCarthy era in the 1950s, The Post held the reckless Senator from Wisconsin to account. It took the lead in exposing Watergate. A job at The Washington Post was a prize for any journalist.
Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013. It was widely assumed that he had “saved” the paper from its financial woes because of his wealth and that he would not interfere with its editorial independence.
But recently, Bezos’ stance changed. He hired Will Lewis, an editor from the despicable Murdoch empire, to turn the paper around financially. The paper has experienced layoffs and censorship. When Bezos’ spiked the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris last fall, more than 300,000 subscribers canceled. When an editorial cartoon lampooning billionaires (including Bezos) courting Trump was killed, the cartoonist quit.
One debacle after another has engulfed The Washington Post since veteran newspaper executive Will Lewis became CEO and publisher a year ago this month, with the charge from owner Jeff Bezos to make the storied newspaper financially sustainable.
The appointment of a new executive editor was botched. A killed presidential endorsement led hundreds of thousands of subscribers to cancel. Top reporters and editors left. Scandals involving Lewis’ actions as a news executive years ago in the U.K. reemerged. A clear vision to secure the Post’s financial future remains elusive.
Frustration boiled over on Tuesday night. More than 400 Post journalists, including some editors, signed a petition asking Bezos to intervene.
“We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave,” it reads, in part.
The petition never cites Lewis by name, but it reads as a sharp indictment of his leadership. Through a spokesperson, Lewis and the Post declined comment for this story. A representative of Bezos did not return a request for comment.
For this story, NPR interviewed 10 Washington Post staffers inside the newsroom and on the business side of the paper, including some who did not sign the petition. They agreed to speak to NPR under condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions inside the paper.
They say the backlash against Lewis encompasses Bezos to some degree, as he has publicly warmed up to President-elect Donald Trump. (The Post declined comment.)
Bezos’ decision to kill a planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris just days before the November election led more than 300,000 subscribers to cancel, wiping out much more modest gains The Post had achieved under Lewis. (A spokesperson says The Post has convinced about 20% of those cancelling over the endorsement to remain subscribers.)
The decision also led to some resignations. Recent days at the Post have witnessed the continuation of a months-long parade of departures of highly regarded newsroom veterans — most recently, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rosalind Helderman, investigative reporter Josh Dawsey and columnist Jennifer Rubin. Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after her sketch showing Bezos kneeling before Trump with a bag of money was rejected.
The tech titan’s business interests, including Amazon Web Services and the space company Blue Origin, receive billions of dollars from federal contracts. He’s given $1 million toward Trump’s inauguration costs and traveled to Mar-a-Lago with his fiancée to meet with the president-elect. Amazon Studios agreed to pay Melania Trump millions of dollars for a documentary project about her, according to Puck News. Come Monday, Bezos is expected to join Trump advisor Elon Musk and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg on the inauguration platform itself.
The petition asked for a meeting with Bezos.
Open the link to continue reading this important article.
During his campaigns, Trump has insisted that he will ban lobbyists from his team and limit their access to him. This was part of his “drain the swamp” pledge.
But it is a new day in Trump world. Trump hired corporate lobbyist Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, and she will determine who gets meetings with him, which invitations he accepts, which phone calls.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump condemned the power of lobbyists in Washington, DC, and pledged that, if he returned to the White House, they would have no influence. “Above all, you deserve leadership in Washington that does not answer to the lobbyists… or to the corrupt special interest but answers only to you, the hardworking citizens of America,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on October 5, 2024.
During an interview with podcaster Theo Von on August 20, 2024, Trump stressed that the key to effective government is to “stop listening to lobbyists,” describing himself as “not a big person for lobbyists.” Trump bemoaned that the lobbyists were “winning” at the expense of the American public. When Von pressed Trump on how, exactly, he would limit lobbyists’ influence, Trump suggested ending the revolving door between lobbying and the federal government. “[O]ne way you could stop it is to say if you’re going to go into government, you can never be a lobbyist,” Trump said.
Two days after he won the election, Trump announced his first selection for his White House staff. He picked corporate lobbyist Susie Wiles to be White House Chief of Staff.
In 2011, Wiles joined the Ballard Partners, a Florida lobbying firm founded by Republican operative Brian Ballard. In 2015, according to a report in the New York Times, Trump asked Ballard who could help him win the state. Ballard recommended Wiles. After Trump won the 2016 election, Wiles decided to help Ballard “set up a Washington office rather than join the new administration.” Prior to Trump winning the White House, Ballard Partners had no federal clients.
It was a lucrative decision, with Ballard Partners raking in $70 million in lobbying fees during the first Trump presidency. Wiles personally represented numerous corporate clients for millions in fees, including Swisher Sweets, a tobacco company that markets candy-flavored cigars, Republic Services, a waste management company seeking to avoid a federal requirement to remove radioactive material from a dump in the St. Louis suburbs, and the Consumer Energy Alliance, a front group for the fossil fuel industry.
Most controversially, Wiles registered as “a lobbyist for Globovisión, a Venezuelan TV network owned by Raúl Gorrín.” Globovisión paid Ballard Partners “$800,000 for a year of work.” The contract was purportedly to provide advice on “general government policies and regulations.” But it soon became clear that the contract was part of Gorrin’s “quiet charm offensive for Nicolás Maduro’s government that sought closer ties with Trump.” Days after Ballard Partners dropped Globovisión as a client, Gorrin was charged “for his role in a billion-dollar currency exchange and money laundering scheme.” In 2019, Wiles also registered as a foreign agent for a Nigerian political party.
Even after Wiles was tapped to lead Trump’s 2024 campaign, she continued working as a federal lobbyist, this time as the co-chair of the lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs. Wiles reportedly maintained that position until she was named Trump’s new Chief of Staff. The Trump campaign claimed she stopped doing work for Mercury Public Affairs beginning in November 2022, but that is contradicted by federal lobbying disclosures. Wiles was listed as Mercury’s sole lobbyist for Swisher Sweets’ parent company, collecting $30,000 in fees in the first quarter of 2024.
With Wiles in the White House, corporations rush to hire Ballard
Will Wiles’ position as Chief of Staff give the lobbying clients of Ballard Partners a powerful channel to influence federal policy? Federal lobbying disclosures tell the story. Since Wiles’ was named as Trump’s top White House aide, corporations have rushed to sign up Ballard Partners to represent them.
In the 66 days since Wiles’ role was announced, Ballard Partners has signed 28 new federal clients. The amount these new clients are paying has not yet been disclosed.
Among the new clients for Ballard Partners is the crypto company Ripple Labs. The company signed with Ballard Partners on November 13, 2024 and is seeking to influence “regulation of digital assets, cryptocurrencies and blockchain and related legislation.” Last Tuesday, Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO, and Stuart Alderoty, Ripple’s Chief Legal Officer, had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump….
Ballard lobbyist nominated to be Attorney General
Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, has worked as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners since 2019. During her tenure, Bondi has represented many clients whom she would be responsible for scrutinizing as the leader of the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Bondi was hired by Uber in 2020. While Bondi was representing Uber, the company allegedly violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by denying rides to blind customers accompanied by guide dogs. According to a July 2024 report by NBC Bay Area, the DOJ is actively investigating these violations. Bondi would now be in a position to decide whether charges should be filed against Uber or her other former corporate clients. Bondi also represented General Motors, which paid a $500,000 criminal fine in November 2024 for submitting a false report regarding its self-driving cars. The fine was paid as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ.
As Attorney General of Florida, a position Bondi held before joining Ballard Partners, Bondi developed a reputation for her “business-friendly” attitude. Bondi, for example, decided to drop a case involving the underpayment of state taxes by the travel site Travelocity. Contemporaneously, a lobbying firm representing Travelocity “helped cover the bill to charter a plane to fly… Bondi and other attorneys general to Mackinac Island in Michigan for a meeting of the Republican Attorneys General Association.”
Notably, Eric Holder, who served as Attorney General during the Obama administration, also worked as a federal lobbyist before taking office.
Donny Convict is what would happen if Dunning and Kruger had a baby, and then dropped it on its head. he’s too fucking stupid to know just how fucking stupid he is. he has these moronic ideas, and then blurts them out like he’s the biggest genius who ever lived. and the MAGA yokels are right there to gobble it all down. yay, Donny! yay, External Revenue Service
Wikipedia: The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their abilities in a specific area, particularly when they have low ability in that task.
Jeff writes:
the Confederacy of Sewer Clowns Big Top Confirmation Circus rolled into DC yesterday, and the first jester to summersault into the ring was Pete Hegseth.
Pete is, of course, the ahem allegedly publicly drunk, ahem allegedly sexual-abusing goon who Donny saw on Fox News and then picked to head the Department of Defense.
here are a few things we learned about ahem allegedly Piss-Drunk Pete.
Senator Duckworth: “…you’re unqualified to do that. you can’t do the acquisition and cross-servicing agreements, which essentially are security agreements. you can’t even mention that. you’ve done none of those. you talked about the Indo-Pacific a little bit, and I’m glad that you mentioned it. can you name the importance of at least one of the nations in ASEAN, and what type of agreement we have with at least one of those nations, and how many nations re in ASEAN, by the way.”
Hegseth: “I couldn’t tell you.”
Senator Duckworth: “no, you couldn’t, because you couldn’t bother to—”
Hegseth: “I know we have allies in South Korea, Japan and Australia.”
Senator Duckworth: “none of those countries are in ASEAN. I suggest you do a little homework before you prepare for these types of negotiations.”
this is the crux of the matter. take away Pete’s ahem alleged predatory behavior towards women. take away the ahem alleged public drunkenness. Pete Hegesth utterly lacks the skills and knowledge required to head the Department of Defense — a massive bureaucracy that employs over 2.91 million people.
as a member of the Minnesota National Guard, Pete rose to the rank of Major. after that, he became a Fox News morning chat-show bobblehead. there’s a reason that Defense Secretaries are almost always lifetime military officers: it takes a lifetime of experience to acquire the skills necessary to do the job. Pete has none of that.
Pete’s only real qualification for the job — the only qualification that matters to Dear Leader — is that he’ll willingly carry out any order. for instance, Pete seems totally cool with shooting American civilians.
Senator Hirono: “in 2020, then-President Trump directed former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to shoot protestors in the legs in downtown DC — an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with. would you carry out such an order from President Trump to shoot protesters in the legs?”
Hegseth: [dodges the question]
Senator Hirono: “that sounds to me that you would comply with such an order. you will shoot protesters in the legs.”
Senator King: “I want to be clear. are we going to abide by the Geneva Conventions and the prohibitions on torture or are we not?”
Hegseth: “what an America First national security policy is not going to do is hand its prerogatives to international bodies.”
oh, that’s lovely. we’re going to ignore a decades-old human rights agreement that almost every other nation on the planet abides by, because AMURRIKKKA FIRST. does Piss-Drunk Pete not realize that the Geneva Conventions also protects American soldiers and civilians? treaties only work when all countries abide by them. Pete should have learned this working well with others crap in kindergarten.
Hegseth: “commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female infantry officers or infantry enlisted. and that disparages those women—”
Senator Gillibrand: “commanders do not have to meet quotas for the infantry. commanders do not have to have a quota for women in the infantry. that does not exist. It does not exist. and your statements are creating the impression that these exist. because they do not. there are not quotas.”
Pete absolutely does not want women serving in the combat. he wrote a book about it. he thinks women serving in the military is just more DEI crap that the commie Democrats cooked up to make America weak. and Pete’s willing to lie and claim that female combat soldiers are being forced upon commanders.
this ‘women can’t do a man’s job’ nonsense is the same misogynistic bullshit we’re hearing from the screech monkeys, about how Los Angeles is burning to the ground because the LA fire chief is a lesbian.
in Donny Convict’s America, only white men should be in positions of authority.
Senator Rounds: “he wants to bring lethality back in.”
here’s the dictionary definition of lethality: the capacity to cause great harm, destruction, or death — basically, what the United States Military already has.
so, why is Senator Rounds so excited to have the military “restored” to its current state? because MAGA Republicans have been brainwashed into believing that commie-marxist Democrats have turned the US armed forces into a bunch of emasculated sissiex who can’t fight. it’s why Esteemed Senator Fidel Cancun practically orgasmed over Russian army propaganda — because he believes this shit, too.
it’s a lie so patently dumb that only a MAGA would believe it — but it’s why Republicans are so hot to have Pete come in. he’s going to bring back lethality — and brutality — against our allies, against American protesters, against anyone Dear Leader tells him to.
Diane Ravitch's blog 