In this post, Heather Cox Richardson demonstrates why she has over one million paid subscribers. She brilliantly weaves together events of the day to show the pattern on the rug. The economy is humming along with new jobs created by Biden. Meanwhile Trump plans massive cuts to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Trump’s goal: to destroy the foundations of the American government. We were warned.
She writes:
On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo locked in a $6.6 billion deal with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for it to invest $65 billion in three state-of-the-art fabrication plants in Arizona. This will bring thousands of jobs to the state. The money comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, about which Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on October 25: “That CHIPS deal is so bad.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he would work to repeal the law, although he backed off that statement when Republicans noted the jobs the law has brought to their states.
Also on Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would have made 4 million workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule raised the salary level below which an employer has to pay overtime from $35,568 to $43,888 this year and up to $58,656 in 2025. The decision by Texas judge Sean D. Jordan kills the measure nationally.
On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America’s “clean energy revolution,” which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term.
But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to Nicolás Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can, though, refuse to advance those standards.
Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate, although as final vote tallies are coming in, it turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote, and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails—four Democrats won in states Trump carried—and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina.
More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.
Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the U.S. government, apparently taking their cue from Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Milei’s “shock therapy” to his country threw the nation into a deep recession, just as Musk says his plans will create “hardship” for Americans before enabling the country to rebuild with security.
Ramaswamy today posted on social media, “A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids.” He has suggested that cuts are easier than people think. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted that on a podcast in September, Ramaswamy said as an example: “If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50 percent cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you’re in, and if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75 percent reduction done.”
But, as Bump notes, this reveals Ramaswamy’s lack of understanding of how the government actually works. Social Security numbers aren’t random; the first digit refers to where the number was obtained. So this seemingly random system would target certain areas of the country.
Today, both Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post and Robert Tait of The Guardian reported that Trump’s economic advisors are talking with Republicans in Congress about cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps, and other welfare programs, in order to cover the enormous costs of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Medicaid is the nation’s health insurance for low-income Americans and long-term care. It covers more than 90 million Americans, one in five of us. Rural populations, which tend to vote Republican, use supplemental nutrition programs more than urban dwellers do.
The Washington Post reporters note that Republicans deny that they are trying to reduce benefits for the poor. They are, they say, trying to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. “We know there’s tremendous waste,” said House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX). “What we don’t seem to have in the hour of action, like when we have the trifecta and unified Republican leadership, is the political courage to do it for the love of country. [Trump] does.”
Those cuts will likely not sit well with the Republicans whose constituents think Trump promised there would be no cuts to the programs on which they depend.
Trump’s planned nominations of unqualified extremists have also run into trouble. Senate Republicans are so far refusing to abandon their constitutional powers in order to act as a rubber stamp to enable Trump’s worst instincts. Former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a Trump bomb thrower, was unqualified to be the nation’s attorney general in any case, but as more information comes out about his alleged participation in drug fueled orgies, including the news that a woman allegedly told the House Ethics Committee that she saw him engage in sex with a minor, those problems have gotten worse.
Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler notes that the lawyers representing the witnesses for the committee are pushing for the release of the ethics committee’s report at least in part out of concern that if he becomes attorney general, Gaetz will retaliate against them.
According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, fear of the MAGA Republican colleagues who are already trying to bully them into becoming Trump loyalists is infecting congress members, too. When asked if Gaetz was qualified for the attorney general post, Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID) answered: “Are you sh*tting me, that you just asked that question? No. But hell, you’ll print that and now I’m going to be investigated.”
The many fringe medical ideas of Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earned him the right-wing New York Post editorial board’s denigration as “nuts on a lot of fronts.” The board called his views “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.” Kennedy is a well-known opponent of vaccines—he called Covid-19 vaccines a “crime against humanity”—and has called for the National Institutes of Health to “take a break” of about eight years from studying infectious diseases, insisting that they should focus on chronic diseases instead.
Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Peter Baker noted that Trump “has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it.” Mischievous glee is one way to put it; another is that he is trying to destroy the foundations of the American government.
Baker notes that none of Trump’s selections would have been anything but laughable in the pre-Trump era when, for example, Democratic cabinet nominations were sunk for a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny, or for a donor-provided car. Nor would a president-elect in the past have presumed to tap three of his own defense lawyers for top positions in the Department of Justice, effectively guaranteeing that he will be protected from scrutiny.
A former deputy White House press secretary during Trump’s first term, Sarah Matthews, said Trump is “drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”
Today Trump confirmed that he intends to bypass normal legal constraints on his actions by declaring a national emergency on his first day in office in order to launch his mass deportation of undocumented migrants. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere.
Finally, today, CNBC’s economic analyst Carl Quintanilla noted today that average gasoline prices are expected to fall below $3.00 a gallon before the Thanksgiving holiday.
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 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.
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.”
Jonathan V. Last writes at The Bulwark, the always interesting gathering spot for Never Trumpers. He wrote that he has been stewing about the intervention of Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of The Washington Post, to stop the editorial board from endorsing Kamala. after Bezos locked the editorial, three of the 10-member editorial board stepped down.
He wrote:
ON FRIDAY, after the Washington Post’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of the editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that—on the very same day—Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin.
Blue Origin, of course, is the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.
What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.
This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden. The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.
When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.
Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.
Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.
So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.
What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.
Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration.
But as bad as that sounds, it isn’t the worst part.
The worst part is the underlying failures that made this arrangement possible.
My friend Kristofer Harrison is a Russia expert who runsthe Dekleptocracy Project. This morning he emailed,
America’s oligarch moment makes us more like 1990s Russia than we want to believe. Political scientists can and will debate what comes first: oligarchs or flaccid politicians. 1990s Russia had that in spades. So do we. That combination corroded the rule of law there, and it’s doing so here.
Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar? I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement. Bezos censored the Post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution. And on and on. The corrosive effect on the rule of law is cumulative.
The Bezos surrender is our warning bell about entering early-stage 1990s Russia. No legal system is able to survive when it there’s a class not subject to it because politicians are too cowardly to enforce the law.
And that’s the foundational point. The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.
So he has sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.
Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won—not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.
Yesterday, Timothy Snyder issued a call to Americans to not obey in advance. He is correct, of course. We should continue to resist fascism as best we can. The stakes have not changed.
If Trump wins? Well, I suppose we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.
What should change is our understanding of where our democracy currently sits on the continuum. We are not teetering at the precipice of a slide into autocracy. We are already partway down the slope. And that’s even if Harris wins.
But Bezos and Trump have just taught America’s remaining small-d democratic leaders: The time for normal politics, where you try to win bipartisan majorities by focusing on “kitchen-table” issues is past. The task in front of us will require aggressive, systemic changes if we are to escape terminal decline.
I have been puzzling over this question since the Democratic National Convention.
Like most people, I didn’t know much about Kamala Harris when she became Vice President. Now that I have seen her speak, now that I saw her debate Trump, I feel very energized to support her campaign for the Presidency.
She is smart, well informed, experienced, committed to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. She is thoughtful and composed. She laughs, she smiles, she seems like a kind and thoughtful person. She is well prepared for the presidency, having won election as the District Attorney of San Francisco, as Attorney General of the State of California, as U.S. Senator from California, and as Vice-President of the United States since Joe Biden and she were elected in 2020.
Her opponent is a bundle of equal parts narcissism and hatred. He likes men. He likes white men. He likes to play tough guy. He looks on women as sex objects and feather heads. He doesn’t respect women.
He is crude, vulgar, without a shred of the dignity we expect from a president. The language he uses to ridicule and insult others is vile.
He is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and a Christian nationalist (without being a practicing Christian).
He is a sexual predator. He is known for not paying people to whom he owes money for services rendered. He has gone through six bankruptcies.
He is ignorant. His former aides say he has never read the Constitution. He is driven by his massive ego. He wants everyone to say he’s the best, the greatest, and there’s never been anyone as great as him.
He is a convicted felon, convicted on 34 counts of business fraud in New York. He was found guilty by a jury in New York of defaming E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually assaulting her many years ago. He was ordered to pay her more than $90 million for continuing to defame her. That judgment is on appeal.
Other trials are pending.
When he lost the 2020 election, he refused to accept his defeat. He schemed to overturn the election by various ploys. He summoned a mob of his fans to Washington on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress gathered for the ceremonial certification of the election. Trump encouraged them to march on the U.S. Capitol, “peaceably….(but) fight like hell.” They did fight like hell. They battered their way into the Capitol, smashing windows and doors, beating law officers, vandalizing the building and its offices, while hunting for Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The outnumbered law officers held them off to protect the members of Congress. Many of them were brutally beaten. Some later died. What if the mob had reached the members of Congress? What if they had captured Pence and Pelosi?
It was the most shameful day of our national history. A President encouraging a mob to sack the Capitol and overturn the Constitution.
Ever since that disgraceful day, Trump has reiterated that the election was stolen from him, even though it wasn’t close. He has undermined faith in the electoral process, faith in the judiciary, faith in the law.
These are the two candidates: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
The Washington Postannounced that it will not endorse a candidate for president in the 2024 election. The Post is one of the most liberal newspapers in the nation. It was purchased in 2018 by billionaire Jeff Bezos. Bezos hired Will Lewis from the Rupert Murdoch news empire to lead the paper.
In a choice between the Democratic candidate, who respects the rule of law, and the former President, who incited an insurrection, The Washington Post will not render an endorsement.
This is the will of the billionaire who owns the paper. I extend my deepest sympathies to the members of the editorial board for the loss of their voice and editorial independence.
CNN wrote:
New York—
For the first time in decades, The Washington Post will not endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election, the newspaper’s publisher announced Friday.
“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” Will Lewis said in a published statement. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
The Post has endorsed a presidential candidate in every election since the 1980s. In his statement, Lewis referred to the Editorial Board’s past decisions to not endorse a candidate, noting that it is a right “we are going back to.”
“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis continued. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
Ahead of the announcement, The Post’s editorial page editor, David Shipley, told staffers that Lewis would be publishing a public note with the decision.
“The news is significant – and I know there will be strong reactions across the department,” Shipley wrote in a memo obtained by CNN.
The Washington Post is owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Newspaper owners typically play a role in their publication’s endorsements and sign off on the editorials which reflect their views.
Marty Baron, a former executive editor of The Post, sharply criticized the decision Friday.
“This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. Donald Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner Bezos (and others),” Baron wrote in a social media post. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
The decision comes just days after The Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, leading to resignations from three editorial board members.
Two additional members of the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times resigned to protest the newspaper owner’s decision not to endorse either candidate.
It’s shameful that two major newspapers have been prevented from expressing the views of their editorial boards by the fist of their billionaire owners.
I sadly add the names of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times –Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos– to the blog’s Wall of Shame. They won’t know or care. But I do. It’s my small gesture of support for sanity and editorial independence .
An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — according to the same sources.
Will Saletan writes for The Bulwark that Trump is openly, blatantly running as a fascist. In recent days, Trump has babbled on about his intention to break all the norms of American leadership. He will use his power to punish people who have challenged him. They are not his “opponents,” they are his “enemies.”
He begins:
DONALD TRUMP IS RUNNING THE MOST openly fascist campaign ever undertaken by a major-party nominee for president of the United States.
That’s not hype; it’s a textbook application of the term. In 2021, Trump used violence to try to overturn an election; in 2022, he called for terminating the Constitution. Now, on the brink of returning to power, Trump is reaffirming his intent to take America deeper into autocracy.
Here are some of the threats and declarations he has issued in the past three months.
1. He says he’s legally immune to all current charges against him.
Four grand juries have indicted Trump on felony charges, and one jury has convicted him. But on August 15, Trump boasted that “the Supreme Court ruled recently on immunity, and I’m immune from all of the stuff that they charge me with.”
2. He claims the right to do whatever he wants as president.
On August 21, Trump asserted (falsely) that the criminal case against him for obstructing recovery of classified documents was invalid because “I had the Presidential Records Act. I had a right to do whatever I wanted to do.”
3. He advocates “one really violent day” of police action.
On September 29, Trump called for police violence against people who appear to be stealing from drug stores or department stores. He proposed an “extraordinarily rough” response: “One real rough, nasty day, with the drugstores as an example,” in which police would take on people who “start walking out with” merchandise. “If you had one really violent day,” said Trump, “one rough hour, and I mean real rough—the word will get out, and it will end immediately.”
4. He vows to indemnify police against “any prosecutions” for doing what he wants.
On October 11, Trump pledged to “indemnify” police officers against any prosecutions” for actions undertaken as part of his planned mass deportations. The next day, he added that when officers confront people walking out of department stores with what appear to be stolen goods, “we’re going to indemnify them against any problems they have.”
The fascists win by dividing the opposition. So join the best pro-democracy community on the internet by becoming a Bulwark+ member.
5. He threatens to use the military against “the enemy within.”
On October 10, in a Fox News interview, Maria Bartiromo asked Trump whether criminals or terrorists from abroad might pose a threat to the United States on Election Day. Trump told her that “the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” not foreigners. “We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics,” said Trump. “And it should be very easily handled by—if necessary—by National Guard. Or, if really necessary, by the military.”
Later in the interview, Trump made it clear that the “lunatics” he was talking about included Democratic politicians. Bartiromo asked Trump how, as president, he would “guard against the bureaucrats undermining you.” Trump repliedthat “the enemy from within,” including “lunatics that we have inside like Adam Schiff,” was “more dangerous than China [or] Russia.”
Last Wednesday, another Fox News host, Harris Faulkner, invited Trump to clarify his meaning. He responded by adding former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the list. “It is the enemy from within, and they’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick,” said Trump. “The Pelosis, these people—they’re so sick, and they’re so evil.”
6. He says some of his political opponents shouldn’t be allowed to run for office.
On August 23, Trump said that Ruben Gallego, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Arizona, “shouldn’t be allowed to even run in this election.” On September 27, he added, “Anybody that wants to defund the police is not qualified and shouldn’t be allowed to even run for president.” On September 28, he declared that due to Kamala Harris’s border policies, “she shouldn’t even be allowed to run.”
7. He says he could have jailed Hillary Clinton.
On August 8, Trump boasted, “With Hillary Clinton, I could have done things to her that would have made your head spin.” On August 15, he said he could have jailed Clinton “very easily.” On August 21, he repeated, “I could have put her in jail.”
In an interview that aired on September 3, podcaster Lex Fridman asked Trump about the temptations of the presidency. “If you become leader again, you’ll have unprecedented power,” said Fridman. “What does that power do to you? Is there any threat of it corrupting how you see the world?”
Trump responded by bragging that he could have jailed Clinton but had spared her. “I could have done a big number on Hillary Clinton,” he said. “She’s so lucky I didn’t do anything. She’s so lucky. . . . I could have done something very bad.”
Donald Trump is an ignorant, narcissistic sociopath.
General John Kelly did not want to speak out against former President Trump. He held his tongue about what he saw in the Oval Office as Trump’s chief of staff. But when Trump threatened to use the military against his critics, General Kelly believed he had to step forward. Sarah Longwell, a Republican turned Never Trumper and publisher of The Bulwark, wrote about the criticism of General Kelly by Trump’s defenders.
WHEN GEN. JOHN KELLY WENT PUBLIC about Trump’s praise for Hitler and his fears about a dictatorial second Trump term, he joined a growing list of former Trump officials ringing the alarm.
He also sparked what has become a pathetic if not predictable pattern, in which a chorus of Trump sycophants obediently rush forward to explain away the alarming revelation and impugn the witness’s credibility.
Here’s reliable Trump lickspittle Scott Jennings telling us that Kelly probably made the whole thing up and that the real Hitlers are on college campuses. Trump apologist Ryan James Girdusky said, “I, honest to God, like most Americans, do not care about Gen. Kelly’s farewell tour.”
Brian Kilmeade on Fox and Friends said of Trump’s praise for Nazi generals: “I can absolutely see him go, ‘It’d be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis, or whatever.” (Not a parody.)
Trump confidante Mike Davis called Kelly “Gen. Christine Blasey Ford”—get it? Chris Sununu is unbothered: “We’ve heard a lot of extreme things from Donald Trump. With a guy like that, it’s kinda baked into the vote.” Sen. Bill Hagerty, on CNN, downplayed the entire revelation as a matter of personal dispute between two men. Kelly and Trump, he said, “were not a good fit.”
There is something deeply pernicious to this routine. These people want you to forget the cumulative weight of the accusations against Trump, especially when those accusations are coming from his own former employees—many of them high-ranking military officers. They’re doing so not because they don’t believe the accusations but because they know how harmful they could be.
You know how we know this? Because the claims of Kelly and others are backed up by what we’ve seen with our own eyes over the last nine years.
Are we supposed to be skeptical that Trump called soldiers “suckers” and “losers” when he said as much out loud about John McCain?
Are we supposed to be skeptical that he praised Hitler’s generals when he admires dictators, dined with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, calls people “vermin,” and talks about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America?
Are we supposed to believe he bears no responsibility for January 6th when we all watched him summon a mob and sic it on the Capitol?
Are we supposed to believe that this is all about some personal tiff between Kelly and Trump when so many others have so many similar accounts?
When Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, told us that “the American people deserve to know that President Trump asked me to put him over my oath to the Constitution” on January 6th?
When James Mattis said Trump’s “use of the presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice”?
When Mark Esper said Trump was “unfit for office,” and put “himself before country”?
When John Bolton warned that “this will be a retribution presidency”?
When Ty Cobb said Trump’s “conduct and mere existence have hastened the demise of democracy and of the nation”?
When Mark Milley called Trump “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country”?
When Bill Barr said Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office”?
I have another idea: Why don’t we accept the obvious truth that is staring us in the face? Trump is dangerous and unfit and all the responsible people who served in his last term have told us as much.
KELLY HAD BEEN RELUCTANT to speak publicly about his assessment of Trump. Previously, he said that speaking out against his former boss wouldn’t even get “a half a day’s bounce.” Trump’s apologists are trying to prove him right. We shouldn’t let them.
Kelly did the right thing. But it’s not enough. These messages need to reach people where they are, especially disengaged voters—not because they aren’t politically potent (they are) but because they fundamentally matter.
When someone of Kelly’s stature and proximity to Trump says the ex-president is a fascist and praised Hitler’s generals, it should send a great chill through our body politic. If this becomes a half-a-day story, it will be an indictment on all of us.
We are now in the home stretch. Millions of voters are—right this moment—making up their minds. This is the time when elections are won or lost. Those other former officials now have an obligation to do what Kelly has: come forward and offer their candid assessments of Trump.
They should do so not just to defend Kelly but to make a larger point: that we can, should, and must be honest about the threat Trump poses.
Trump’s defenders want us to doubt what we have seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears. They want us to treat a White House chief of staff confirming that the former president praised Hitler and called members of the military “suckers and losers” as just another bit of campaign fodder—not evidence of something fundamentally rotten at the core of their movement. If we allow that to happen, it will be a stain on our politics akin to electing Trump himself.
ADDENDUM BY DIANE: SARAH FORGOT TO INCLUDE THE PUNGENT COMMENT ON TRUMP BY HIS FIRST SECRETARY OF STATE REX TILLERSON. HE SAID: “TRUMP IS A “F—— MORON.”
General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s Chief of Staff, and General Mark Milley, who was appointed by Trump as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the nation’s highest ranking officer), both warned in recent days that Trump is a fascist at heart.
Trump now calls both men stupid and incompetent, even though he appointed them.
Kelly told the New York Times that Trump should not be re-elected because of his desire to be an absolute dictator and his ignorance of the Constitution:
He said that, in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.
Mr. Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Mr. Kelly said….
He discussed and confirmed previous reports that Mr. Trump had made admiring statements about Hitler, had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the United States as “losers” and “suckers” — comments first reported in 2020 by The Atlantic...
When Mr. Kelly left the White House in 2019, he decided he would speak out on the record only if Mr. Trump said something that he found deeply troubling or involved him and was wildly inaccurate.
Mr. Trump’s recent comments about using the military against what he called the “enemy within” were so dangerous, he said, that he felt he had to speak out.
Using the Military Inside the U.S.
“And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump was repeatedly told dating back to his first year in office why he should not use the U.S. military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so. Mr. Trump nevertheless continued while in office to push the issue and claim that he did have the authority to take such actions, Mr. Kelly said.
General Mark Milley told author Bob Woodward that: “former president Donald Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.'”
When Gen. Mark Milley retired last year, following more than four decades of military service to the United States, he delivered a retirement speech that included some language that did not go unnoticed. “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator — or wannabe dictator,” the retiring general said.
Many assumed, of course, that he was referring to Donald Trump, but the phrasing was at least somewhat subtle, and the four-star Army general did not elaborate. At least, he didn’t elaborate publicly at the time.
As The Washington Post reported, Milley apparently put subtlety aside when speaking to Bob Woodward for the longtime journalist’s new book.
Retired Gen. Mark A. Milley warned that former president Donald Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” in new comments voicing his mounting alarm at the prospect of the Republican nominee’s election to another term, according to a forthcoming book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.
Milley’s assessment of the Republican candidate is rooted in first-hand experience: Trump handpicked Milley to serve as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the general worked alongside the then-president for more than a year.
“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” the general told Woodward. “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”
Milley went on to note that he feared a possible court martial in a second Trump term — despite the fact that he’s now a civilian — and those concerns are well grounded. After all, according to Trump’s former Defense secretary, Mark Esper, Trump set out to have two highly decorated retired military leaders — Stanley McChrystal and William McRaven — court-martialed for saying things about the former president that he didn’t like.
Diane Ravitch's blog 