Writing on the MSNBC website, former Obama administration official Brandon Friedman explains why Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense is unqualified. Pete Hegseth is a FOX News host on “Fox and Friends.” He served in the National Guard and deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo. He started his career as a financial analyst at Bear Stearns.
Why is he unqualified?
Friedman writes:
Where to begin? Let’s start with the big one: Hegseth is not qualified for this role. He has no particular experience or expertise that would lead any sane person to put him in charge of America’s military, including the largest governmental bureaucracy in the world.
He has no managerial experience. The defense Department has 3 million people on its payroll and a budget of $842 billion. It’s a massive bureaucracy.
His personal life is messy. While married to his first wife, he had a baby with a woman who became his second wife (he now has a third wife).
Friedman: This is relevant because it’s not clear Hegseth can even get a security clearance, much less the type needed to run the Defense Department. Behavior like that opens individuals to blackmail and espionage and many aspiring civil servants each year are denied clearances for far less.
He was part of a 12-person group that was not allowed to assist in Biden’s Inauguration because of his tattoos, including one that is a white supremacist symbol.
He has opposed punishment of American military who are accused of war criminals. He opposes DEI initiatives in the military. He opposes women in combat, even those who have passed the physical tests to become green Berets or Seals.
Others have written about one of Hegseth’s quirks. He says he hasn’t washed his hands in ten years. He can’t see the germs so he doesn’t believe in them. (Not even after going to the toilet? Disgusting. Wear gloves if you ever meet him.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump has said he wouldn’t be a dictator — “except for Day 1.” According to his own statements, he’s got a lot to do on that first day in the White House.
When he took office in 2017, he had a long list, too, including immediately renegotiating trade deals, deporting migrants and putting in place measures to root out government corruption. Those things didn’t happen all at once.
Here’s a look at what Trump has said he will do in his second term and whether he can do it the moment he steps into the White House:
Trump has said that “within two seconds” of taking office that he would fire Jack Smith, the special counsel who has been prosecuting two federal cases against him. Smith is already evaluating how to wind down the cases because of long-standing Justice Department policy that says sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted.
Trump cannot pardon himself when it comes to his state conviction in New York in a hush money case, but he could seek to leverage his status as president-elect in an effort to set aside or expunge his felony conviction and stave off a potential prison sentence.
A case in Georgia, where Trump was charged with election interference, will likely be the only criminal case left standing. It would probably be put on hold until at least 2029, at the end of his presidential term. The Georgia prosecutor on the case just won reelection.
Pardon supporters who attacked the Capitol
More than 1,500 people have been charged since a mob of Trump supporters spun up by the outgoing president attacked the Capitol almost nearly four years ago.
Trump launched his general election campaign in March by not merely trying to rewrite the history of that riot, but positioning the violent siege and failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a cornerstone of his bid to return to the White House. As part of that, he called the rioters “unbelievable patriots” and promised to help them “the first day we get into office.”
As president, Trump can pardon anyone convicted in federal court, District of Columbia Superior Court or in a military court-martial. He can stop the continued prosecution of rioters by telling his attorney general to stand down.
“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump said on his social media platform in March when announcing the promise. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.”
Dismantle the ‘deep state’ of government workers
Trump could begin the process of stripping tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections, so they could be more easily fired.
He wants to do two things: drastically reduce the federal workforce, which he has long said is an unnecessary drain, and to “totally obliterate the deep state” — perceived enemies who, he believes, are hiding in government jobs.
Within the government, there are hundreds of politically appointed professionals who come and go with administrations. There also are tens of thousands of “career” officials, who work under Democratic and Republican presidents. They are considered apolitical workers whose expertise and experience help keep the government functioning, particularly through transitions.
Trump wants the ability to convert some of those career people into political jobs, making them easier to dismiss and replace with loyalists. He would try to accomplish that by reviving a 2020 executive orderknown as “Schedule F.” The idea behind the order was to strip job protections from federal workers and create a new class of political employees. It could affect roughly 50,000 of 2.2 million civilian federal employees.
Democratic President Joe Biden rescinded the order when he took office in January 2021. But Congress failed to pass a bill protecting federal employees. The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s chief human resources agency, finalized a rule last spring against reclassifying workers, so Trump might have to spend months — or even years — unwinding it.
Trump has said he has a particular focus on “corrupt bureaucrats who have weaponized our justice system” and “corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus.”
Beyond the firings, Trump wants to crack down on government officials who leak to reporters. He also wants to require that federal employees pass a new civil service test.
Impose tariffs on imported goods, especially those from China
Trump promised throughout the campaign to impose tariffs on imported goods, particularly those from China. He argued that such import taxes would keep manufacturing jobs in the United States, shrink the federal deficit and help lower food prices. He also cast them as central to his national security agenda.
“Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump said during a September rally in Flint, Michigan.
Trump would likely not need Congress to impose these tariffs, as was clear in 2018, when he imposed them on steel and aluminum imports without going through lawmakers by citing Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. That law, according to the Congressional Research Service, gives a president the power to adjust tariffs on imports that could affect U.S. national security, an argument Trump has made.
“We’re being invaded by Mexico,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina this month. Speaking about the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, Trump said: “I’m going to inform her on Day 1 or sooner that if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25% tariff on everything they send into the United States of America.”
Roll back protections for transgender students
Trump said during the campaign that he would roll back Biden administration action seeking to protect transgender students from discrimination in schools on the first day of his new administration.
Opposition to transgender rights was central to the Trump campaign’s closing argument. His campaign ran an ad in the final days of the race against Vice President Kamala Harris in which a narrator said: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
The Biden administration announced new Title XI protections in April that made clear treating transgender students differently from their classmates is discrimination. Trump responded by saying he would roll back those changes, pledging to do some on the first day of his new administration and specifically noting he has the power to act without Congress.
“We’re going to end it on Day 1,” Trump said in May. “Don’t forget, that was done as an order from the president. That came down as an executive order. And we’re going to change it — on Day 1 it’s going to be changed.”
It is unlikely Trump will stop there.
Speaking at a Wisconsin rally in June, Trump said “on Day 1″ he would “sign a new executive order” that would cut federal money for any school “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children.”
While it is likely that any of these actions would end up in court, as Biden’s change to Title XI has. Trump does have considerable power through executive orders to implement these promises.
Drill, drill, drill
Trump is looking to reverse climate policies aimed at reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
With an executive order on Day 1, he can roll back environmental protections, halt wind projects, scuttle the Biden administration’s targets that encourage the switch to electric cars and abolish standards for companies to become more environmentally friendly.
He has pledged to increase production of U.S. fossil fuels, promising to “drill, drill, drill,” when he gets into office on Day 1 and seeking to open the Arctic wilderness to oil drilling, which he claims would lower energy costs.
When asked to respond to the claim, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said “the Ukrainian crisis cannot be solved in one day.”
Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News after Trump was declared the winner of the election that Trump would now be able to “negotiate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.” She later said, “It includes, on Day 1, bringing Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table to end this war.”
Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago. Trump, who makes no secret of his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, has criticized the Biden administration for giving money to Ukraine to fight the war.
At a CNN town hall in May 2023, Trump said: “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done — I’ll have that done in 24 hours.” He said that would happen after he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin.
Begin mass deportations of migrants in the US
Speaking last month at his Madison Square Garden rally in New York, Trump said: “On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”
Trump can direct his administration to begin the effort the minute he arrives in office, but it’s much more complicated to actually deport the nearly 11 million people who are believed to be in the United States illegally. That would require a huge, trained law enforcement force, massive detention facilities, airplanes to move people and nations willing to accept them.
Trump has said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act. That rarely used 1798 law allows the president to deport anyone who is not an American citizen and is from a country with which there is a “declared war” or a threatened or attempted “invasion or predatory incursion.”
He has spoken about deploying the National Guard, which can be activated on orders from a governor. Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser, said sympathetic Republican governors could send troops to nearby states that refuse to participate.
Asked about the cost of his plan, he told NBC News: “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”
As you recall, I wrote here that I believe that Putin rigged our election. I don’t know how but the best hacking leaves no tracks. But “no evidence” is not evidence. No one is investigating.
But there is more.
A woman named Julia Davis translates Russian media and posts what the Russian press reports.
Tass, the main Russian newspaper, wrote this on November 11:
Trump to rely on forces that brought him to power — Russian presidential aide
Nikolay Patrushev agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration”
MOSCOW, November 11. /TASS/. In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.
“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”
“But very often election pledges in the United States can diverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.
Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.
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.
Jamelle Bouie writes regularly for The New York Times. I subscribed to get extra writing from him. In this one, he asks the question that has undoubtedly occurred to many people.
Bouie writes:
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
Michael Tomasky of The New Republic offers his view about why Trump won. I think it was because Putin intervened with hacking. Most think it was high prices, the cost of eggs and gasoline. Some say it was because Kamala had no agenda (I disagree). Some say it was her unwillingness to detach from unpopular Biden. Some say it was Biden’s fault for not dropping out a year earlier. Tomasky disagrees.
He wrote:
Item one: It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.
I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.
These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?
The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”
But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.
I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails). But in the late 1990s, and after the internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well, along with the internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting websites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, V.C.-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.
And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beach ball and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.
That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.
But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015–16, Fox made Trump possible.
And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.
The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.
Likewise with the postdebate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote aboutat the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.
Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.
I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.
I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)
Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia, in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”
Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”
To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it too has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the op-ed page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.
Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.
And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasyland. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun.Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or News Corp will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.
I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.
It’s the same reason Viktor Orbán told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”
This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro–abortion rights initiative and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.
The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and TikTok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is
Pundits today have spent time dissecting the election results, many trying to find the one tweak that would have changed the outcome, and suggesting sweeping solutions to the Democrats’ obvious inability to attract voters. There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.
There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.
But my own conclusion is that both of those things 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.
As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”
X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.
Many voters who were using their vote to make an economic statement are likely going to be surprised to discover what they have actually voted for. In his victory speech, Trump said the American people had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
White nationalist Nick Fuentes posted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” and gloated that men will now legally control women’s bodies. His post got at least 22,000 “likes.” Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, previously funded by Russia, posted: “It is my honor to inform you that Project 2025 was real the whole time.”
Today, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would launch the “largest mass deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants, and the stock in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic jumped 41% and 29%, respectively. Those jumps were part of a bigger overall jump: the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved up 1,508 points in what Washington Post economic columnist HeatherLong said was the largest post-election jump in more than 100 years.
As for the lower prices Trump voters wanted, Kate Gibson of CBS today noted that on Monday, the National Retail Federation said that Trump’s proposed tariffs will cost American consumers between $46 billion and $78 billion a year as clothing, toys, furniture, appliances, and footwear all become more expensive. A $50 pair of running shoes, Gibson said, would retail for $59 to $64 under the new tariffs.
U.S. retailers are already preparing to raise prices of items from foreign suppliers, passing to consumers the cost of any future tariffs.
Trump’s election will also mean he will no longer have to answer to the law for his federal indictments: special counsel Jack Smith is winding them down ahead of Trump’s inauguration. So he will not be tried for retaining classified documents or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost in 2020.
This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!”
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.”
Adam Kinzinger is a military veteran and was a Republican member of Congress. He voted to impeach Trump, then served on the J6 Commission. His was a reliable Republican vote until January 6, 2021.
When I decided to stand against Donald Trump, I knew exactly what was coming: backlash, threats, smear campaigns, even the occasional call to “watch my back.” These are the predictable tactics of a bully who’s cornered and desperate to regain control. But here’s the truth — I’m absolutely, resolutely unafraid of Donald Trump. Even after his win. Because I know how this all ends, and it won’t be pretty.
You see, Trump depends on fear. He builds his whole image around being “strong,” “tough,” a supposed champion of the “common man.” But strength doesn’t come from endless bullying, degrading insults, or an ability to throw temper tantrums every time he doesn’t get his way. That’s not strength; it’s weakness. Real strength means standing up for the truth even when it’s hard, even when it costs you. Trump has never had the courage to do that. I have.
Some people might assume I should worry about Trump or fear his so-called “retaliation.” Let’s be honest — what would that even look like? Mean posts on his social media platform? Outrageous nicknames? Maybe a mob of his most ardent supporters trying to intimidate me or my family? Been there, seen it. And I’m still here. Trump’s tactics are predictable, tired, and, frankly, more sad than threatening.
What Trump and his enablers don’t seem to understand is that I’m free from the shackles of political expediency. I didn’t get into this line of work to serve a political cult or bend the knee to any one person. I serve the Constitution and the country I swore an oath to protect. My loyalty is to the principles that make America strong, not to a man who’s turned our democracy into his personal grievance project.
Trump is, at his core, a coward. When things get tough, he runs. He ran from the military, despite claiming he could take on foreign leaders; he’s spent years hiding behind lawyers, attacking the justice system rather than standing tall and defending his actions in court. Time and again, he’s shown that he’s all bark, no backbone.
Contrast that with what I and others in the military have done. We sign up knowing the risks, knowing we could face life-threatening situations, all in the service of a cause greater than ourselves. Trump has never faced a risk he didn’t try to dodge or an obligation he didn’t shirk. I’m proud to stand up against him because he embodies everything I oppose: cowardice, corruption, a complete lack of respect for the rule of law.
I’m not backing down, not because I’m trying to make a name for myself, but because it’s simply the right thing to do. America deserves leaders who aren’t afraid of bullies, who don’t bend to the winds of political fortune, and who don’t take the easy way out. America will reject him again, in due time. It’s a process, but the long memory of history will remember his influence as a flash in a pan. And that starts by showing him, and anyone like him, that fear-mongering is no match for true courage.
Diane Ravitch's blog 