NPR reported on the resignation of Laura Helmuth, the editor of Scientific American, in the wake of her comments about Trump on social media after the election. Who knew that Trump supporters were such snowflakes? Trump constantly sneers at and insults people and he got elected President. She expressed her reaction to his election and was forced out.
Before coming to Scientific American, Helmuth was previously the health and science editor for The Washington Post. She was also the President of the National Association of Science Writers.
NPR wrote:
Laura Helmuth, the chief editor of Scientific American magazine, announced her resignation on Friday after comments she made disparaging supporters of President-elect Donald Trump gained attention in conservative circles.
In a post on the social media platform Bluesky, Helmuth wrote, “I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief. She added, “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching).”
In subsequent messages on Bluesky, which were later deleted, Helmuth referred to some of Trump’s supporters as “the meanest, dumbest, most bigoted” individuals celebrating his election night victory over Vice President Harris.
She also expressed regret to younger voters, stating that her generation is “so full of f****** fascists.”
Helmuth later apologized for her remarks, writing: “These posts, which I have deleted, do not reflect my beliefs; they were a mistaken expression of shock and confusion about the election results.”
Helmuth’s comments and resignation come in the wake of a highly contentious election season, during which media organizations and their reporters struggled with how to address Trump and his allies concerning conspiracy theories, their plans to consolidate power to the White House, and threats to their perceived enemies.
For only the second time in its nearly 180 years, Scientific American endorsed a presidential candidate, backing Kamala Harris while describing Trump as a threat to public safety who “rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies.”
In an emailed statement to NPR, Kimberly Lau, president of Scientific American, confirmed Helmuth’s resignation, stating, “Laura Helmuth has decided to move on from her position as editor in chief. We thank Laura for her four years leading Scientific American, during which time the magazine won major science communication awards and established a reimagined digital newsroom. We wish her well in the future.”
Helmuth is a courageous editor. Her departure is a loss to freedom of thought and expression, as well as to science.
If you are on BlueSky, check out her posts. Especially her list of the outstanding articles published on her watch.
Trump knows that there is a strong possibility that some of his nominees for his Cabinet are so unqualified that they may not be approved by the Republican majority of the Senate. The Senate typically advises and gives its consent to high-level appointments. But Trump is trying to exercise a relatively obscure provision of the Constitution to bypass the Senate.
Since we know that Trump never read the Constitution, it’s certain that one of his creative lawyers planted the idea.
Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz, who faces allegations of sex-trafficking minors and drug abuse, as Attorney General, produced shock and disbelief among some Republicans. So has Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump would elevate to the highest position in the American intelligence community. So has Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine advocate, to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Medical and scientific experts are appalled. So has Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth, FOX talk show host, to lead the department of Defense.
But Trump could give them “recess appointments” and have no scrutiny or review by Senators. And avoid the risk that some or all might be rejected.
We know that Trump doesn’t care about norms, traditions or laws that constrain his power. If the Senate abandoned its role to please Trump, he would be empowered to trample the rule of law at every turn. That is most definitely a threat to our democracy.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune says “all options are on the table,” and has neither accepted or refuted the scheme.
President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to turn the Constitution’s appointment process for Cabinet officers on its head. If what I’m hearing through the conservative legal grapevine is correct, he might resort to a cockamamie scheme that would require House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to play a critical role. Johnson can and should immediately put an end to this scheme.
The Senate’s power to approve or reject a president’s nominees for Cabinet positions is a fundamental feature of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. As Alexander Hamilton explained in the Federalist Papers, that power “would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters,” including those “who had no other merit than that … of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of [the president’s] pleasure.” Almost as if Hamilton were describing Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general.
To be sure, the Constitution also provides a backup provision that allows the president to make recess appointments — “to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate.” But as Hamilton put it, this “auxiliary method of appointment” is “nothing more than a supplement” to the “general mode of appointing officers of the United States” and is to used “in cases to which the general method was inadequate.”
It appears that the Trump team is working on a scheme to allow Trump to recess-appoint his Cabinet officers. This scheme would exploit an obscure and never-before-used provision of the Constitution (part of Article II, Section 3) stating that “in Case of Disagreement” between the houses of Congress, “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”
Under this scheme, it appears that the House would adopt a concurrent resolution that provided for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate. If the Senate didn’t adopt the resolution, Trump would purport to adjourn both houses for at least 10 days (and perhaps much longer). He would then use the resulting intrasession recess to appoint Gaetz and other Cabinet nominees.
Ten years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia labeled the president’s recess-appointment power an “anachronism” because “modern forms of communication and transportation” make the Senate always available to consider nominations. Along with three of his colleagues, Scalia also argued that the president’s power to make recess appointments is limited to intersession recesses and does not apply to the intrasession recess that the Trump scheme would concoct. The justice, who died in 2016, would be aghast at the notion that a president could create an intrasession recess for the purpose of bypassing the Senate approval process for nominations.
Mike Johnson should not be complicit in eviscerating the Senate’s advice-and-consent role. He should promptly make clear that the House will abide by its usual schedule of recesses and will not attempt to engineer a recess of the Senate.
Edward Whelan is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the Antonin Scalia chair in constitutional studies.
Trump got a campaign donation of $100 million from Dr. Miriam Adelson, Israeli-born wife of the billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson. She is passionate about Israel.
Secretary of State-designate Rubio is pro-Israel.
Trump’s choice for Ambassador to Israel is Christian evangelical Mike Huckabee, who is more Zionist than Netanyahu. Huckabee is a fervent believer in annexation and an opponent of a two-state solution. He has said that there are no Palestinians.
Why would American Muslims endorse a man who tried to ban Muslims in his first term?
Trump nominated former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence, the person at the pinnacle of the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and more than a dozen other intelligence agencies. Her nomination is startling, not only because she has no relevant experience, but far more important, because she has a history of defending Putin, no matter what he does. These may be her sincere beliefs yet they hardly suggest that she should control America’s intelligence agencies.It’s doubtful that she could get a security clearance to work at the CIA or any of the other intelligence agencies. Yet Trump wants to put her in charge.
Writing at The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last asks: Is Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset or a dupe? Open the link to finish reading the article.
1. Aloha, Comrade!
When you woke up yesterday the idea that Pete Hegseth—a philandering morning TV host who has never run anything bigger than a frozen banana stand—could serve as the secretary of defense was the most preposterous idea in the history of the federal government.
By dinner time Trump had issued two nominations that made Hegseth look like Bobby Gates.
The Matt Gaetz appointment is getting most of the attention because of the irony. The DoJ being controlled by a man who was recently investigated by the same department for having an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, whom he (allegedly) paid to travel with him? It’s too good.
Also, in the near term, the attorney general can a lot of damage to America. The AG has the power both to turn the state against its citizens and to shield wrongdoers from accountability.
But it’s the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence that worries me more. Because for a decade Gabbard has looked and behaved like a Russian asset.
In four terms as a congresswoman her most notable actions were ongoing defenses of two war criminals: Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.
Let me tell you her story.
It began in 2013, when Assad’s military used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. The Obama administration was mulling over responses and Gabbard argued that America should not intervene. She said she would vote against authorizing Obama to use force.
In December 2016, Gabbard sought an audience with the newly-elected Trump to promote a bill she called the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act.” The goal of this bill was to withdraw U.S. military support for the Syrian rebels fighting against the combined forces of Assad and Putin.1
And in 2017, Gabbard made an unannounced trip to Syria. She did not give her congressional colleagues advance notice that she was traveling to the region and she refused to disclose who had funded the trip. While there, she met with Assad. Twice.
In fact, Gabbard’s only notable break with Trump came in 2017, after Trump authorized a cruise missile strike on Syria in retaliation for Assad deploying nerve agents against civilians. Gabbard called this—Trump’s action, not Assad’s—“dangerous,” “rash,” and “reckless.”2
And she kept going. In 2019, she proclaimed that Assad “is not the enemy of the United States.”
For an on-the-make politician, that’s an awful lot of political capital spent defending a mid-level war criminal. Curious, no?
But of course, it wasn’t really about Syria. It was about Russia.
When Gabbard made her failed presidential run in 2020, she was surreptitiously backed by Russian cyber assets. Russia’s interest in promoting Gabbard was obvious enough that Hillary Clinton publicly observed that it was clear the Kremlin was grooming her.
The extent of Gabbard’s affinity not just for Assad, but for Putin, spilled into the open when Russia invaded Ukraine. Gabbard defendedPutin’s invasion even before it began, blaming the Biden administration for forcing Russia’s hand.3
Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, she said that it was the Biden administration who wanted war in Ukraine:
President Biden could end this crisis and prevent a war with Russia by doing something very simple. . .
Guaranteeing that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO because if Ukraine became a member of NATO, that would put U.S. and NATO troops right on the doorstep of Russia, which, as Putin has laid out, would undermine their national security interests. . . .
The reality is that it is highly, highly unlikely that Ukraine will ever become a member of NATO anyway. So the question is, why don’t president Biden and NATO leaders actually just say that and guarantee it?
Which begs the question of why are we in this position then? If the answer to this and preventing this war from happening is very clear as day. And really, it just points to one conclusion that I can see, which is, they actually want Russia to invade Ukraine.
Why did Gabbard think Biden wanted Russia to invade Ukraine? So that it could impose sanctions on Putin. And to be clear here: Gabbard thought that imposing sanctions on Vladimir Putin would be terrible. She explained:
It gives the Biden administration a clear excuse to go and levy draconian sanctions, which are a modern-day siege against Russia and the Russian people.
Sanctions, by the way, are a long-standing bugaboo of Gabbard’s. In 2020, she introduced a bill designed to prove that U.S. sanctions kill children in foreign countries so as to make it harder for the U.S. to deploy sanctions against adversaries.
So in case you’re keeping score: Gabbard is opposed both to U.S. military intervention and to U.S.-imposed sanctions.
But she is not opposed to the Syrian dictator gassing civilians or Russia pursuing its “security interests” by invading neighboring countries.
As the war progressed, Gabbard would go on to parrot Russian claims about the United States funding “biolabs” across Ukraine as part of her ongoing attempt to justify Putin’s aggression.
After Putin arrested a Russian journalist who protested the invasion of Ukraine, Gabbard rushed onto TV to defend Putin. She claimed that the media environment in Russia was “not so different” from America.
Last April, Gabbard accused President Biden of trying to “destroy” Russia:
All the statements and comments that the Biden-Harris administration has made from the beginning of this [Russo-Ukrainian] war essentially point to their objective being basically to destroy Russia.
In case you cannot tell: Gabbard viewed the “destruction” of the Putin regime in Russia as a bad thing.4
Is Gabbard a Russian asset? I don’t know if that’s how she sees herself. But the Russians certainly view her that way.
Here’s the thing about intelligence assets: Sometimes an asset is a person you must own and direct. But sometimes an asset will do what you want her to, either with gentle, indirect inputs or completely under her own steam.
Walter Duranty did not officially report to the Kremlin, but Stalin viewed him as a valuable asset and made sure to stroke him and position him in ways that were useful to the USSR. The result was that Duranty’s dispatches to the New York Timeswere indistinguishable from something a KGB-controlled spy would have written.
Whether or not Duranty saw himself as a Russian agent, Stalin and the Soviet secret services classified him as an asset and were diligent in Duranty’s care and feeding.
So when it comes to Gabbard, ask yourself: What would she have done differently over the last decade if she had been formally controlled by Putin?
Gabbard says, over and over, that the only thing she cares about is “peace.” But in this quest for peace she has, over and over, attacked and attempted to discredit the U.S. intelligence community while embracing propaganda emanating from the Kremlin.
She has attempted to stop U.S. military intervention against Russian allies while also opposing sanctions against them.
She has met secretly with Russian clients.
She has blamed the United States for an invasion conducted by Russian forces, attempted to draw false equivalence between America and Russia, and accused the American president of being unfairly belligerent toward Putin—whose regime has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and abducted 20,000 Ukrainian children.
Even if Gabbard is only an unwitting dupe, from the Russian perspective her elevation to DNI would represent the greatest achievement in the history of espionage. Russia will have fully penetrated the American intelligence apparatus at the very top level.
Having Gabbard serve as DNI would probably set back America’s intelligence services by a generation.
First, asset recruitment would become impossible. Any potential recruit in the field would be a fool to cooperate with U.S. intelligence knowing that the American DNI was at least functionally on Putin’s side.
Second, no secrets would be safe. There is no way Gabbard could pass a security clearance check in 2024. The only way for her to gain access to this level of information is to be appointed to the top of the organization. She could never be considered for a job inside, say, the CIA.5
Third, she’s not even on America’s side. Just objectively speaking Gabbard views the American government as a problem to be resolved and the interests of the Russian government as valid and worth accommodating.
Making Gabbard director of national intelligence simply makes no sense. It’s the equivalent of the American government gouging its own eyes out and purposefully making itself blind to the covert actions of its adversaries.
Or rather, it makes no sense for America.
For Russia, DNI Gabbard makes all the sense in the world.
When Trump announced that he intended to nominate Representative Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney General, a gasp went up in both political parties.
Gaetz has been a fierce Trump loyalist, which is why Trump chose him. He certainly didn’t choose him because he is an eminent member of the bar, because he has the respect of his peers, or because he is a pillar of integrity. Trump wants someone who is certain not to investigate him and certain to prosecute Trump’s “enemies.” Perhaps Trump thinks he has found his latter-day Roy Cohn, a man who can be counted on to twist the law to justify whatever Trump wants.
Gaetz was just reelected on November 5, yet resigned as soon as Trump announced that he had chosen him to be Attorney General, the very epitome of our justice system.
Candidates for the Cabinet usually wait to see if they are confirmed before resigning. Why did he rush to resign a seat he just won?
The House Ethics Committee was investigating serious charges against him and was about to issue its report. His resignation ends the investigation.
The lawyer representing a woman former Rep. Matt Gaetz allegedly had sex with when she was a minor called on the House Ethics Committee to “immediately” release its report into his alleged conduct.
“Mr. Gaetz’s likely nomination as Attorney General is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events,” attorney John Clune wrote Thursday on X. “We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report. She was a high school student and there were witnesses.”
Gaetz has repeatedly denied the allegations. A spokesperson for Gaetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The former congressman was also the subject of a separate federal sex trafficking investigation by the Department of Justice — which he could soon lead — but was ultimately not prosecuted. That probe, started in 2020 during the Trump administration, was focused on whether Gaetz paid women for sex and traveled overseas to attend parties with teenagers under the age of 18.
In May, he was subpoenaed to sit for a deposition in a civil lawsuit brought against the woman with whom he allegedly had sex — who is represented by Clune — by a friend of Gaetz, ABC News reported.
House Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters Wednesday before Gaetz’s resignation that the probe would end if Gaetz was no longer a member of the House — and reiterated that position on Thursday.
But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have said they hope to review the report ahead of Gaetz’s Senate confirmation. Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) demanded in a statement that the House Ethics Committee share its findings with the Senate Judiciary Community, saying “We cannot allow this valuable information from a bipartisan investigation to be hidden from the American people.”
Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post described the Gaetz nomination as “a middle finger to the Senate.” She hopes it never reaches a vote. Maybe Trump is testing the Senate to see how low they will go to please him.
Gaetz, a Florida Republican, says Trump’s ties to Russia should never have been investigated. He wants “the Biden crime family” to face justice. And he called nonpartisan D.O.J. officials whom he may soon oversee the “deep state.” He has introduced legislation that would limit sentences for people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and suggested “abolishing every one of the three-letter agencies,” including the F.B.I.
Then-Representative Markwayne Mullin, now a senator, candidly told CNN last year that Gaetz bragged about having sex with young women to other members on the floor of the House of Representatives.
“We had all seen videos … of the girls that he had slept with,” Mullin said. “He’d crush [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.” Mullin, now a Senator, has done a total 180 on this, saying on Wednesday that he “completely” trusts Trump’s decision to nominate Gaetz.
Trump announced that his $100 million donor Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would head a Department of Government Efficiency with the job of redesigning and downsizing the federal government. Did we elect Musk? Ramaswamy? Who are these guys? They say they will cut the federal budget by 1/3. Will they cut Social Security? Medicare? National defense?
Trump also announced his choice of a FOX News host to head the Departnent of Defebse, a position previously held by a four-star general.
President-elect Donald J. Trump is turning to two of his most prominent wealthy backers, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to overhaul the federal government, saying on Tuesday that they would lead what he called the Department of Government Efficiency.
Calling it “the Manhattan Project” of this era, Mr. Trump said the department would propel “drastic change” throughout the federal bureaucracy by July 4, 2026.
“A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement. “I am confident they will succeed!”
Mr. Musk said before the election that he would help Mr. Trump cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, but he did not elaborate on Tuesday night about how he would do that, or which parts of the government would be cut or restructured.
“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Mr. Musk said in the statement.
Among a blizzard of announcements on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump also said he would nominate Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to be his next defense secretary. In veering away from a traditional defense secretary, Mr. Trump elevated a television ally to run the Pentagon and lead 1.3 million active-duty troops.
President-elect Trump on Tuesday named Elon Musk and onetime Republican presidential wannabe Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, calling it “the Manhattan Project of our time.”
Despite its name, the department is not a government agency, and Trump said the pair would offer “advice and guidance” to the White House in partnership with the Office of Management and Budget, which is a government agency.
“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),” Trump said in a statement from his transition team Tuesday evening, calling them “two wonderful Americans” poised to help his administration “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies — Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement.”
If Trump follows through with his education proposals, if the Republican-controlled Congress lets him do it, America’s students and teachers are in for a world of hurt.
Mercedes Schneider writes here about what’s at stake. I did not copy and paste the article in full. It is excellent. I urge you to open the link.
I do not believe American education is a top concern for Donald Trump. I do believe that he could well turn it over to the likes of the Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025, so long as nobody outshines him in the press and puts anything (Constitution included) ahead of loyalty to him above all else.
Now that the election is over, Trump allies are openly admitting that Project 2025 was the Trump plan all along.
One featured Project 2025-Trump issue is the proposed dismantling of the US Department of Education (USDOE), which was created during the Carter administration. Talk of getting rid of USDOE began with the Reagan administration(in other words, soon after it was created). It should come as no surprise that in 1980, the “fledgling” Heritage Foundation was in Reagan’s ear and is proud to declare as much in the opening pages of its Project 2025:
page xiii
Several decades later, USDOE still exists, and several decades later, the Heritage Foundation is still trying to kill it.
Heritage et al. has taken great pains to outline its 900+-page wish list of ultra conservatism, including nixing USDOE. However, it would take a lot to achieve the kind of legislative unity required to dissolve a federal department that supports numerous Americans in desired and positive ways, not the least of which is via the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
Brookings offers a concise discussion of the Project 2025 plan for education, including this “sample list” of negative consequences:
Of course, the key is to have legislatures jump onto the choice bandwagon and force choice onto voters whether they want it or not. But some voters do benefit from having access to publicly-subsidized private schools: Those with money. Heritage alludes to Arizona’s “expanded program… available to all families. However, in Arizona, those accessing school voucher cash tend not to be the working class but more affluent families.
Speaking of the affluent and private school vouchers: Billionaire former US Ed secretary Betsy DeVos, who in 2023 could not get private school vouchers over the line in her home state of Michigan, apparently smells opportunity.
On January 07, 2024, DeVos resigned as Trump’s US ed sec. In her resignation letter, DeVos placed the fault of January 06, 2024, chaos squarely on Trump:
In a November 07. 2024, interview with EdWeek about advice for Trump’s next Ed sec, , DeVos is fact checked as she tries to put lack of a school choice “big moment” at the feet of the Democrats. Not so, Betsy:
During Trump’s first term, DeVos’ inability to push private school choice to her liking has to be attributed in part to some Republican resistance to the idea. Heritage and any Heritage-sympathetic ed sec could well face similar issues in Trump’s second term.
I did not copy the entire article. Open the link to finish reading it.
Greg Olear is a novelist, journalist, author, and blogger. He has a long memory and thinks clearly. When I read his work, I hear echoes of what I’m thinking.
We are a few days removed from an orange guillotine slicing through the neck of American democracy. The chicken that is our body politic, already dead but in denial, is running around with its head cut off, and will continue to do so until January 20, when Donald the Conqueror picks up that severed head with his tiny hands and holds it up for all the bewildered world to behold, in triumph. Trump and triumph have the same Latin root word, the English major in me is compelled to point out.
(JD Vance—who I’ve been warning for months is an actual fascist—is among the numerous Dark Enlightenment thought leaders who use the word “regime” to mean the Deep State, so it is not without irony that these same Nazis will be replacing the bureaucracy that is the lifeblood of our country with an actual regime—regime, from rex, for king.)
Already the Trump Reich is licking its chops (literally as well as figuratively, one imagines), preparing to implement its ugly mass deportation program. That this idea polled well with Americans, and was supported enthusiastically by Latino men in particular, boggles the mind. Mass deportation is a quaint euphemism for genocide. If the new regime has its way, this will be more of a pogrom than a program. The suffering will be unimaginable; the effect on the economy Trump voters claim to care so much about, devastating.
And the new regime will seek vengeance upon its enemies. The loyalists who will actually be running the country after the professional civil servants are purged—angry, sadistic men like Mike Davis and Stephen Miller and Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon and Kash Patel—have been promising this for months. Trump’s perceived enemies, everyone from Jack Smith to Adam Schiff to Taylor Swift, are potentially in real danger. The generals who tried to warn us about him, the leaders of the intelligence community who know what he really is, his political rivals—these stalwarts of democracy may well end up at the wrong end of a firing squad. I am not exaggerating. Ivan Raiklin, Flynn’s Renfield, fancies himself the Minister of Retribution. Vengeance, more than anything, is what the new king wants, and vengeance he will have.
President Biden, for all the good he’s done, has failed for four years to fully grasp the dire threat we face from the despotic MAGA forces and their allies in Moscow, Beijing, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and legacy and social media. Putin has been openly waging war on the West since 2014, when he invaded and occupied the Crimea—a violation of the international order President Obama essentially chose to ignore. Like Neville Chamberlain, Obama did not want a war, and like Neville Chamberlain, he did not understand the nature of the psychopath he was up against; unlike Neville Chamberlain, he was not leading a country recently removed from four years of brutal war, and unlike Neville Chamberlain, he had the precedent of Neville Chamberlain to learn from. It’s only gotten worse from there.
The real tragedy is: We didn’t need to send in troops to beat the Russians. All we needed to do was treat the information war Moscow was waging on us as an actual front in an actual war, and give Ukraine as many weapons as it needed to do the dirty work for us. Biden did neither, and his entire legacy, all the good work he’s done, may wind up meaningless because of these failures.
Unless he’s working behind the scenes with the DOJ to clean up the mess—and nothing the somnambulant Merrick Garland has done, or rather not done, these past four years gives me any confidence that he is—Biden has already waved the white flag.
“Yesterday, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory,” Biden said yesterday. “And I assured him that I would direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. That’s what the American people deserve.” That’s what we deserve, you see—our elected officials to lead us into the abattoir while assuring us, as Biden also did, that “[t]he American experiment endures, and we’re going to be okay” as long as we “keep going” and “keep the faith.”
Even worse is this: “Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable. We all get knocked down, but the measure of our character, as my dad would say, is how quickly we get back up. Remember, a defeat does not mean we are defeated. We lost this battle.” A transition to permanent Nazi rule looms, and Biden wants us to jam to “Tubthumping.”
Jim Stewartson, who has been shouting from the rooftops about the threat of Trump’s muscle for years now—and who is certainly in the crosshairs of Flynn and Raiklin—articulated this perfectly, in his open letter to Biden:
You had the power to fix this. You should have had the information to understand the threat that we were facing. Instead you treated it like just another Democratic presidency, hoping that if the economy were good enough it would fix the problem with all the “MAGA extremists.”
You were wrong. You didn’t listen to those of us who told you who tried to steal the election from you in 2020. You let your DOJ and FBI drag their feet with the perfect timing to let Donald Trump and his co-conspirators go free. You prosecuted all the foot soldiers and never went after the “generals.” You prioritized “norms” and the “independence” of the DOJ over us. You failed to lead, to demand accountability — from Merrick Garland, Chris Wray and the others who let this happen on your watch.
I hear you talking now about “all that we accomplished” in your “historic administration” as if that will have any impact on the psychopaths who will destroy everything that you have done. You could have been the inflection point to preserve our world and make it better, instead you presided over a transition into an authoritarian global nightmare.
Sadly, Biden did not, as Stewartson laments, understand the threat we were, and are, facing—even though he is old enough that he was alive during World War II, and thus should be able to recognize Nazis when he sees them. What was done to counter Russian propaganda? To stop Elon Musk, Putin’s buddy and an enemy of democracy, from buying and destroying Twitter? From eradicating the cancer that is Fox News from its position of journalistic authority?
The historian Heather Cox Richardson had this to say about the election in her own post-partem piece:
But my own conclusion is that both of those things [inflation and racism/sexism] were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Trump admires Hitler, but he’s not Hitler—not even America’s Hitler, as the VP-Elect once called him. He is more Marshal Pétain or Vidkun Quisling: the nominal head of a Nazi puppet regime. As I explained a month before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin is Hitler. Trump’s return to the White House is, among other things, the end of American exceptionalism, the end of American hegemony, the end of the Pax Americana. You know—setbacks.
Cue up the “U-S-A” chants, we are soon to become a Kremlin vassal state! Maybe the idea that the United States is better than everyone else, that the moral arc of the American universe always bends towards justice, is an obvious myth we choose to believe in despite ample evidence to the contrary—kind of like how the media doesn’t dispute that the woman who went to the polls with Trump on Election Day wearing dark oversized sunglasses was the real Melania.
Are Americans inherently good, freedom-loving, devoted to free speech and free worship, committed to all people being created equal? That’s our founding myth, and isn’t it pretty to think so? But a glance at history shows it’s not true. Bodies in graves and jails across America disprove it. We’re freedom-loving when times are easy, devoted to speech and worship we like with lip service to the rest, and divided about our differences since our inception. That doesn’t make us worse than any other nation. It’s all very human. But faith in the inherent goodness of Americans has failed us. Too many people saw it as a self-evident truth that the despicable rhetoric and policy of Trump and his acolytes was un-American. But to win elections you still have to talk people out of evil things. You can’t just trust them to reject evil. You must persuade. You must work. You have to keep making the same arguments about the same values over and over again, defend the same ground every time. Sometimes, when people are afraid or suffering and more vulnerable to lies, it’s very hard. Trump came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross (upside down, but still) and too many people assumed their fellow Americans would see how hollow that was. That assumption was fatal.
Not a setback, you see. Fatal. Fatal. Nazis are destroyers, and the new regime is here to destroy, just like their Uncle Ted wanted:
It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were failures. But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an old form of society and the other is to set up the new form of society envisioned by the revolutionaries. The French and Russian revolutionaries failed (fortunately!) to create the new kind of society of which they dreamed, but they were quite successful in destroying the old society.
That’s Ted as in Ted Kaczynski. These people worship at the altar of the Unabomber!
The best time to defeat Nazis is before they gain any power, as any cursory glance at the history of 20th century Europe makes clear. From Warsaw, in a country that was ravaged by the Third Reich like no other, Dustin Du Cane points out an awful truth in his piece today, “Four Wasted Years”: “Hitler wasn’t defeated by voting, ground roots campaigning, sanctions or sending Poland a tank a week,” he writes. “He was defeated by propaganda, curtailing the free speech of Nazis, by a war machine and by millions of men in boots with rifles, tanks and bombers.”
And as I’m not the first to point out—someone else tweeted this, and I can’t remember who—the Germans at least had the good sense to put Hitler in jail after his failed coup attempt, before handing him the keys to the kingdom. Us? We threw the book at some Proud Boys and let Trump, Flynn, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the rest of the coup plotters continue to strut around broadcasting their hate, rubbing our noses in their stinky MAGA shit. As documented indefatigably by Stewartson, my friend Gal Suburban, and very few members of the legacy media, the coup plotters spent four years telling us what they planned to do, like the bad Bond villains they are, while the DOJ basically ignored them. But hey, at least Merrick Garland went after Ticketmaster.
In terms of analyzing why Kamala Harris lost, Noah Berlatsky wrote the best post-mortem piece I came across, for Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice. There was a lot in his piece to be optimistic about—if not for the fact that we are capitulating to a vengeful sexual predator who has been granted full immunity by his fellow fascists on the Supreme Court for any “official act,” up to and including siccing the military on civilians and executing his perceived enemies. Berlatsky says:
Democrats hoped to stave off fascism in the Trump era by never losing elections. That was never feasible, and now that it has failed, we are all facing the miserable consequences of not prosecuting Trump immediately, and vigorously, after January 6.
Those consequences will be real, devastating, and long lasting. But it’s important to realize that the Republicans have not established a permanent or even solid mandate for all of Trump’s ugly orange dreams. As they won, so they can lose — which is why one of MAGA’s core goals going forward will be to subvert free and fair elections. Fighting for democracy, as well as helping each other survive the coming fascist assault, will be key in the years ahead.
To have a free election, candidates have to be free to run without fear of reprisal from the ruling party. Even if the Orange Grover Cleveland vouchsafes us midterm elections in 2026—and we cannot assume that he will—how comfortable will the opposition party be in exercising its free speech as it campaigns against him?
If we continue on this path, and Biden sits back and watches as Trump dismantles the federal regulatory agencies, and the FBI, and the CIA, we do have a few things working in our favor:
First, unlike Russia and other states where dictatorships have arisen, the United States has a long history of democratic rule (aspirational democratic rule, but still). We have that to fall back on.
Second, Trump is old and uninterested in governance and unlikely to last long in office, because of retirement, death, or the 25th Amendment. Vance is worse, because he’s younger and smarter and more ideological, but he lacks the political “rizz” necessary to maintain a cult of personality. This is a guy who plausibly fucks couches. Even when enabled by Peter Thiel and Musk, can he really hold onto power?
Third, most Americans—not many; most—will hate the stuff the new regime will roll out, including the mass deportations they once cheered on. As my friend Nina Burleigh, whom no one ever accused of peddling “hopium,” wrote on Wednesday, we Americans
are also fickle. After four more years of the right running amok, when Trump 2.0 kleptocrats have not delivered the fantasies Orange has peddled of prosperity for all, it will dawn on enough Americans that this regime will never fill the deep and endless yearning for our birthright—HAPPINESS. Because: Who can? And then, angry again, we will give this claque of oafs, orcs, rapists, misogynists, fake Christians, racists, neo-Nazis, and liars the boot they deserved last night.
The question is whether enough Americans will rise up to do so, or if they will just blame all the failures on Biden, as Fox News and Facebook will instruct them to do, and go back to watching football. Me, I like to think even the gun-toting MAGA won’t like it when the jackboots come for their friends and family members.
For me, the real glimmer of hope is that the leaders of the Blue States seem prepared for the fight ahead, and, unlike Biden, willing to take it on. Kathy Hochul and Leticia James, the governor and attorney general of my state of New York, were particularly reassuring about this. The latter, no fan of Trump, said this:
As Attorney General, I will always stand up to protect New Yorkers and fight for our rights and values. My office has been preparing for a potential second Trump Administration, and I am ready to do everything in my power to ensure our state and nation do not go backwards. During his first term, we stood up for the rule of law and defended against abuses of power and federal efforts to harm New Yorkers. Together with Governor Hochul, our partners in state and local government, and my colleague attorneys general from throughout the nation, we will work each and every day to defend Americans, no matter what this new administration throws at us. We are ready to fight back again.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called lawmakers on Thursday into a legislative special session next month “to safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration.”
In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker said on Thursday he would ask his state’s legislators, possibly as soon as next week, to address potential threats from a second Trump term. “You come for my people,” Mr. Pritzker said at a news conference, “you come through me.”
That is the kind of leadership we need—not platitudes about setbacks and “we’ll get ‘em next time.”
The time to take on the Kremlin was four years ago. Unless Biden does something unexpected in the next 70-whatever days—a Jayden Daniels “Hail Maryland” completion to save democracy—that moment has passed. Putin will soon have his puppet back in the White House, this time with the backing of the Supreme Court, the Senate, probably the House, and a staff of bloodthirsty fascist true believers; that is a far bigger victory for Moscow than the U.S. making like the USSR and disbanding. Sorry, Abe Lincoln, but I would rather live in a smaller democracy than a Trump dictatorship.
And as much as I’d like to think otherwise—and I assure you, I’ve spent the last few days trying—it’s foolhardy to believe that the immediate future will be anything but a Trump-branded sneaker stomping on a human face. Nazis don’t stop being Nazis because you show them decency and respect, as Biden and Harris have both stupidly chosen to do. We cannot expect that Trump or anyone in his regime will be anything other than what they are, or will do anything other than what they’ve told us they plan to do.
Again this week, I quote the German poet Kurt Tucholsky: “My life is too precious to put myself under an apple tree and ask it to produce pears.”
Glenn Kessler is the fact checker for The Washington Post. He describes what it is like to check the nation’s most notorious prevaricator.
Kessler writes:
In my 14 years as The Washington Post Fact Checker, nine have been devoted to dissecting and debunking claims made by Donald Trump. Indeed, no person has been fact-checked more often than Trump, as he has bested or outlasted foes — Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — who drew their share of fact checks. And no other person has consistently earned Four Pinocchios — the badge of a committed liar — day after day, week after week.
I first covered Trump as a business reporter in the 1980s, so I was very familiar with his long history of exaggeration and bravado when he burst onto the political stage in 2015 (not counting his brief flirtation with the Reform Party in 2000). “Businessman Donald Trump is a fact checker’s dream … and nightmare,” I wrote in the fact check of his speech announcing that he would seek the presidency.
Now, he has convincingly won a second term via the electoral college and is even on track for the first time in three tries to win the popular vote. After his first two races, I wrote analyses that, in retrospect, misjudged the Trump phenomenon.
In 2016, I noted that “based only on anecdotal evidence — emails from readers — one reason that Trump’s false statements may have mattered little to his supporters is because he echoed things they already believed.” But I expressed hope that “now that Trump will assume the presidency, he may find that it is not in his interest to keep making factually unsupported questions.”
As an example, I noted that during the campaign he had claimed that the unemployment rate was 42 percent, rather than the 5 percent in official statistics. I suggested that he might find himself embarrassed to be contradicted by the official data once he took office.
I was wrong. He embraced the numbers as his own — and then bragged that he had created the greatest economy in American history, even though he had inherited it from Barack Obama. When Trump was defeated in 2020, my analysis carried a headline that is embarrassing in retrospect: “Fact-checking in a post-Trump era.” I wrote that “his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden suggests that adherence to the facts does matter.”
The Fact Checker documented more than 30,000 false or misleading claims that Trump made during his presidency. Indeed, through that term, Trump was the first president since World War II to fail to ever win majority support in public opinion polls. A key reason was that relatively few Americans believed he was honest and trustworthy, an important metric in Gallup polls. Gallup has described this as “among his weakest personal characteristics.”
As evidence that Trump was hurt by falsehoods, I pointed to Biden’s narrow victories in Arizona and Georgia: “It’s quite possible that at least 9,000 people in Arizona and 5,000 in Georgia were upset enough at Trump’s continued false attacks on native sons Sen. John McCain (R) and Rep. John Lewis (D), even after they died, that they decided to support Biden over Trump.”
The essay appeared before Trump embarked on a months-long campaign to claim that Biden won only through election fraud — a lie debunked in court ruling after court ruling. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, inspired by his rhetoric, appeared to be an indelible stain. Yet from 2020 on, Trump used his false claim to maintain his Republican support and build a base for his comeback.
In this election campaign, Trump once again resorted to false claims and sometimes outrageous lies, especially on immigration and the economy. He rode a wave of discontent about inflation — a problem in every industrialized country after the pandemic — to falsely claim that the economy was a disaster, despite relatively low unemployment, falling inflation and strong growth.
Last month, the Economist magazine published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world.” Yet exit polls show that two-thirds of voters said the economy was in bad shape.
I do not write fact checks to influence the behavior of politicians; I write fact checks to inform voters. What voters — or politicians — do with the information in the fact checks is up to them.
Trump certainly benefits from an increasingly siloed information system — a world in which people can set their social media feeds or their television channel so they receive only information that confirms what they already believe. It’s perhaps not an accident that Trump’s rise in politics coincides with the rise of social media, which he adeptly used to first attract attention by elevating (false) questions about Obama’s birth certificate.
In this campaign, Trump made many promises that will be difficult to achieve, such as reducing the national debt and cutting energy prices in half. He also said he would reduce inflation, though that’s already been mostly achieved, and many economists say his plan to impose large tariffs on imported goods might spark inflation again.
No matter what happens, or how many fact checks are written, this time I won’t doubt his ability to convince his supporters that it’s all good news — or that the problem is the fault of someone else, facts notwithstanding.
Everyone knew it would be a close election. Few anticipated Trump’s sweeping victory over Kamala Harris. The New York Times editorial board endorsed Kamala Harris. This is their next-day reaction.
American voters have made the choice to return Donald Trump to the White House, setting the nation on a precarious course that no one can fully foresee.
The founders of this country recognized the possibility that voters might someday elect an authoritarian leader and wrote safeguards into the Constitution, including powers granted to two other branches of government designed to be a check on a president who would bend and break laws to serve his own ends. And they enacted a set of rights — most crucially the First Amendment — for citizens to assemble, speak and protest against the words and actions of their leader.
Over the next four years, Americans must be cleareyed about the threat to the nation and its laws that will come from its 47th president and be prepared to exercise their rights in defense of the country and the people, laws, institutions and values that have kept it strong.
It can’t be ignored that millions of Americans voted for a candidate even some of his closest supporters acknowledge to be deeply flawed — convinced that he was more likely to change and fix what they regarded as the nation’s urgent problems: high prices, an infusion of immigrants, a porous southern border and economic policies that have flowed unequally through society. Some cast their votes out of a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo, politics or the state of American institutions more broadly.
Whatever drove this decision among these voters, however, all Americans should now be wary of an incoming Trump administration that is likely to put a top priority on amassing unchecked power and punishing its perceived enemies, both of which Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to do. All Americans, regardless of their party or politics, should insist that the fundamental pillars of the nation’s democracy — including constitutional checks and balances, fair-minded federal prosecutors and judges, an impartial election system and basic civil rights — be preserved against an assault that he has already begun and has said he would continue.
At this point, there can be no illusions about who Donald Trump is and how he intends to govern. He showed us in his first term and in the years after he left office that he has no respect for the law, let alone the values, norms and traditions of democracy. As he takes charge of the world’s most powerful state, he is transparently motivated only by the pursuit of power and the preservation of the cult of personality he has built around himself. These stark assessments are striking in part because they are held not just by his critics but also by those who served most closely with him.
We are a nation that has always emerged from a crucible with its ideals intact and often toughened and sharpened. The institutions of our government, hardened by nearly 250 years of disputation, turmoil, assassinations and wars, held firm when Mr. Trump assailed them four years ago. And Americans know how to counter Mr. Trump’s worst instincts — actions that were unjust, immoral or illegal — because they did so, over and over, during his first administration. Civil servants, members of Congress, members of his own party and people he appointed to high office often stood in the way of the former president’s plans, and other institutions of our society, including the free press and independent law enforcement agencies, held him accountable to the public.
Mr. Trump and his movement have all but taken over the Republican Party. Yet it is also important to remember that Mr. Trump can’t run for another term. From the day he enters the White House, he will be, in effect, a lame-duck president. The Constitution limits him to two terms. Congress has the power — and for some ambitious Republicans, perhaps the political incentive — to set a course away from Mr. Trump’s antidemocratic agenda, if it chooses to pursue it.
Governors and legislatures across the nation have spent months shoring up their state laws and Constitutions to protect civil rights and liberties, including access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care. Even states that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, including Kentucky, Ohio and Kansas, have rejected the most extreme positions on abortion. Other institutions of American civil society will play a crucial role in challenging the Trump administration in the courts, in our communities and in the protests that are sure to return.
The rest of the world, too, has no illusions about the leader who will soon again represent the United States on the world stage. The countries of the NATO alliance were shocked, during the first Trump administration, by his willingness to undermine that long and valuable partnership. But European nations, defying Mr. Trump’s predictions, not only came together with the United States in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but also expanded their ranks right up to Russia’s border.
For the Democratic Party, rear-guard action as the political opposition will not be enough. The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election. It took too long to recognize that President Biden was not capable of running for a second term. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system — which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.
The test for members of this new Congress will begin soon after they take their oath. The president-elect has promised to surround himself in his second term with enablers prepared to pledge loyalty to him, who will be willing to do whatever he commands. But a president needs the Senate to approve many of those appointments. Senators can stop the most extreme or unqualified candidates from taking cabinet positions like defense secretary and attorney general, as well as seats on the Supreme Court and the federal bench. They can act to keep clearly unfit candidates from holding any powerful position. The Senate did that in 2020, when it blocked Mr. Trump’s attempts to seat unqualified people on the board of the Federal Reserve, and the chamber should not hesitate to do so again.
Perhaps the most important responsibility lies with all of those who will serve in a second Trump administration. Those he appoints as attorney general, as secretary of defense and to other top leadership roles should expect that he may ask them to carry out illegal acts or violate their oaths to the Constitution on his behalf, as he did in his first term. We urge them to recognize that whatever pledge of loyalty he may demand, their first loyalty is to their country. Standing up to Mr. Trump is possible, and it is the duty of every American public servant when appropriate.
But the final responsibility for ensuring the continuity of America’s enduring values lies with its voters. Those who supported Mr. Trump in this election should closely observe his conduct in office to see if it matches their hopes and expectations, and if it does not, they should make their disappointment known and cast votes in the 2026 midterms and in 2028 to put the country back on course. Those who opposed him should not hesitate to raise alarms when he abuses his power, and if he attempts to use government power to retaliate against critics, the world will be watching.
Benjamin Franklin famously admonished the American people that the nation was “a republic, if you can keep it.” Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat to that republic, but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy. That outcome remains in the hands of the American people. It is the work of the next four
