Destruction is the point

In her February 1st newsletter, Heather Cox Richardson identified the three factions currently at work in the Trump administration. 

1. Trump and his minions who want revenge
2. The Project 25 crew who want to establish a theocracy
3. The tech bros, led by Elon Musk, who want a monarchy in which the oligarchs rule 

As she points out, there's something that all three groups have in common, despite their different motivations - a "determination to destroy the federal government. " 

That's where Timothy Snyder, author of "On Tyranny" steps in with a specific warning about the tech bros (emphasis mine).

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

It's true folks, there is a coup going on...as we speak.

The word for this is "coup."

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— Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) (@hcrichardson.bsky.social) February 2, 2025 at 10:41 AM

“That’s when they suspended the constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t any rioting in the streets. People stayed home, watching their televisions, looking for direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put a finger on.” - Margaret Atwood, Handmaids Tale

— desertdiva2024.bsky.social (@desertdiva2024.bsky.social) February 2, 2025 at 10:51 AM

Snyder notes that, while Trump is merely a tool the oligarchs are using, Vice President J.D. Vance has been in on the plot all along. 

Back in 2018, Adam Sewer rightly pointed out that cruelty was the point. When it comes to the president himself, that is still true. But since Musk bought him off, the oligarchs are now in control and the central charge is all about destruction. 

It is imperative that we all understand that this is what's going on. It can feel like the whole world is topsy-turvy and that none of what's going on makes any sense. In one way it doesn't. But as the walls of our democracy begin to crumble around us, we need to understand that destruction is the point. Once that sinks in, we are better prepared to develop the guerrilla tactics that are necessary for the kind of asymmetrical confrontation we're facing. Snyder has some ideas on that. So I recommend that you read his whole piece.

Think like a community organizer: Do a power analysis.

As rational Americans, we're right to be enraged and afraid right now. The response from some folks has been to criticize elected Democrats for not shouting loud enough.

What we’re not hearing is your anger. We’re not hearing your outrage. We’re wondering whether or not you actually hear us.

My suggestion would be to shout as loud as you want. But when you're done, take a moment to think about the serenity prayer. 

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. 

There is a reason why the serenity prayer has been such a powerful tool in helping people who are dealing with addiction. Too often when we are enraged and/or fearful, we lash out at things that are out of our control. In the end, we are defeated and feel powerless. That's when the second part of the prayer emerges. Our energies are better focused on the things we actually have the power to change. The wisdom comes in knowing the difference, and in embracing the fact that we are not powerless victims. 

In the picture above, Barack Obama isn't leading an AA meeting. He's teaching community organizing. The picture cuts off the top right-hand corner, but it is clear that - much like the serenity prayer suggests -  he's talking about doing a "Power Analysis." That starts with learning the difference between where we do/don't have the power to change things.

I have been reminded of that as I watch Josh Marshall basically do a power analysis over at TPM.  He, too, invoked the serenity prayer.

But this is also fundamentally a battle for public opinion, which means it’s about the next election and sowing divisions in the majority party. That means it’s very much a long haul. Unsatisfying and scary, yes, but that doesn’t make it less the reality. The whole game here [for MAGA] is whipping up false perceptions of urgency that can’t be met, which leads people to despair and giving up.

I tend to think of these things in a political form of the “serenity prayer” usually attributed to the 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: know what power you lack, use the power you have to the maximum extent possible and do your best to distinguish between the two. “Serenity” sounds to many people to very much fail to meet the moment. But serenity is actually power. (It’s also resilience but let’s focus for now on the power part of the equation.) This is of necessity very much an asymmetric confrontation. It can’t not be. The White House has all the executive authority and, indirectly, the congressional power as well. When Trump or Bannon or Steven Miller talk about overwhelming the opposition, they really mean goading them to meet every new thrust as a pitched battle on open ground which they’ll of course lose since — to extend the metaphor — the Republicans have a big army and the Democrats have no army. Because of the 2024 election. So Democrats keep running out onto the open field with no power or defense and getting crushed, which creates these repeated set pieces of helplessness and impotence. That amounts to free programming for Donald Trump. To stretch the metaphor a bit further, this is for the moment a guerrilla conflict for the Democrats — cutting communications and supply lines, taking out fuel and arms depots and then running back into the hills. As we said yesterday: “Find what you can actually do that’s not begging or meaningless and then do it.”

The part we cannot change is the fact that we are very much in the midst of "an asymmetric confrontation" due to the results of the 2024 election. Democrats hold none of the traditional forms of political power. 

So we can keep beating our heads against a wall and feeling powerless, or we can assess what power we actually have. Marshall has laid out some possibilities.

1. We have the power to influence public opinion.

Sometimes, getting the message out to the people who need to hear it (ie, Trump supporters) involves working with those who have institutional power and are seeing their own self-interests affected by Trump/Musk. 

For example, we're expecting Trump to unleash his 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada today. While we've grown accustomed to backpedaling from Sen. Susan Collins, she just issued some dire warnings about what those tariffs will mean to her state of Maine. Similar warnings are coming from J.P. Morgan.  While Republicans probably wouldn't listen to Democrats complaining about things like tariffs, they're more likely to listen to Republican politicians and J.P. Morgan. We can all share their concerns with friends/family/coworkers.

As the fallout from Trump/Musk grows, there will be a lot of these kinds of examples that can be used to influence public opinion.

2. We have the power to challenge Trump/Musk in the courts.

I have bookmarked the "Litigation Tracker" being maintained at the web site, Just Security. As I write, 23 lawsuits have been filed against the executive orders issued by Trump. Marshall explains why that is important.

[C]ritical to a battle over public opinion in an onslaught such as this is slowing things down as much as possible, throwing as much sand in the gears as possible. That’s stretches out the time people can get an understanding of what’s happening. It increases their visibility of what’s happening...

But the point isn’t ‘courts will save us’ malarkey. (In any case, that’s now mainly the mocking phrase of wreckers and sad sacks.) It’s putting sand in the gears, slowing things down as one front in the battle for public opinion.

3. We have the power to force change when Republicans have to work with Democrats on things like the debt ceiling. Here's how that would work:

The clearest lever out there is that the White House needs a debt limit increase sometime this spring, probably pretty soon. There’s been chatter that Republican leaders are going to try to put together a spending deal with Democratic help that would include a debt limit increase or suspension. That has to be taken off the table. No debt limit increase unless the President renounces illegal and constitutional actions. That’s the clearest place where opposition Democrats can take the initiative and force the President and GOP leadership to come to them. Anything that doesn’t force that is basically meaningless.

You’ve probably heard me say before that no one should ever play chicken with the full faith and credit of the United States. Well, these are extraordinary circumstances.

I have to admit that I have reservations about that one. We've always understood that it is dangerous to play chicken with the debt ceiling. But I'm willing to at least entertain the idea given our current circumstances.

Those are the tactics Marshall has put forward. I suspect that there are a lot more guerrilla tactics that could be used at this point. It's time to do a power analysis, let go of the things we can't change, and get on with using the power we DO have to be the opposition.  

P.S. I'm quoting Josh Marshall a lot because, as far as I can see, he's doing the best job of analyzing our current situation and proposing pragmatic steps for going forward. If you haven't already, I urge you to subscribe to his site, Talking Points Memo. It is an invaluable resource.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt steps out of the gate with "lie, distract, and blame."

At the beginning of her first press conference on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt proclaimed that she is committed to "telling the truth from this podium every single day." Based on the record of people who held that position during Trump's first term, it probably shouldn't surprise us that she went on to lie.

Several fact-checkers have taken on the one Levitt told about why the administration put a freeze on all foreign aid. She claimed that Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) found that $50 million was about to go “out the door to fund condoms in Gaza." Not true!

[T]he latest spending report from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) indicated that none of the $60.8 million worth of contraceptive and condom shipments it funded in the year prior went to Gaza, and it sent no condoms to the Middle East whatsoever. The vast majority of the condoms the agency buys are for health programs in Africa.

Even after an administration official walked back Levitt's claim, Trump repeated it Wednesday night, adding the nonsense Jesse Watters threw into the mix about how Hamas was using the condoms to make bombs. 

What really happened is that, on the day Trump was inaugurated, he issued an executive order freezing all foreign assistance. The backlash was so severe that a week later, Sec. of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver exempting $60 billion in foreign aid from the freeze. 

In other words, the administration had egg on its face and, instead of owning up to their mistake, decided to lie, distract, and blame the Biden administration. 

Levitt also cleared up a lie that will be used a lot in this administration's plans for mass deportation. When Trump, Vance, or Homan talk about prioritizing the deportation of "criminals," they really mean all undocumented immigrants.

Just to be clear, have all undocumented immigrants committed a crime? Not necessarily.

Another lie Leavitt told really blew me away.

According to Karoline Leavitt, egg prices are soaring because Biden killed all the chickens.

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— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 1:03 PM

She actually said that "the Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than one hundred million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore a lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage."

It's almost as if she wants us to believe that Biden or someone in the Department of Agriculture is a serial chicken murderer rather than the fact that bird flu is fast approaching a national emergency - which is why so many producers are having to kill whole flocks of their chickens. 

Here's the dilemma Leavitt is facing: if she admits that egg prices are being impacted by the bird flu, she negates all of Trump's campaign rhetoric about blaming the price of eggs on Biden. Can't have that because Dear Leader is always right. So instead, she comes up with this ridiculous claim about Biden directing the mass killing of chickens. Lie, distract, and blame. 

I'm sure that, now that Trump has laid the blame for Wednesday's airplane crash on the DEI policies of the Biden administration (before the investigation even gets underway), Leavitt will join Vance, Hegseth, and Duffy in backing up that lie next time she steps up to the podium.

Of course, none of this is new to any of us. During his first administration Trump told over 30,000 lies. But the one time you can count on a lie from this president and his enablers, is when he fails. Here's what I wrote about that at the beginning of his first term: 

That is a good reminder that this president lies to get what he wants. He has done so constantly from day one. What happens is that when he lies, there is a firestorm of a reaction where we all focus on the lie until the media gets bored with it and we move on – or until Trump tells another whopper and the cycle starts all over again. Unless we connect the dots, the lies become episodic rather than indicative of a pattern... 

What I’m describing here is the way in which Donald Trump exhibits behaviors associated with a severe personality disorder. He fabricates a world in which he is both dominant and successful. When challenged, he diverts with outrageous lies designed to blame a villain and distract us from his failures. He then assumes we’ll all move on to the next fabrication of his dominance and success.

The one thing we can be certain of is that nowhere in that pattern is there a place for reflection on reality or a feedback loop for self-correction.

 In other words, it's deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.

Have Americans actually gotten over their dictator phobia?

Over the last few days, a few major media outlets have explained how the Trump administration is busy implementing the plans put forward in Project 25 - which the president pretended to disavow during the campaign. 

But it is also important to note that Trump is actually going beyond what Project 25 promoted. With his freezing of both foreign aid and domestic spending, the president is implementing "impoundment," which is the term used to describe a president refusing to spend money that Congress has appropriated. 

In some ways, the president and his campaign went farther than Project 2025 in asserting presidential power over federal purse strings. In his Agenda 47, Trump endorsed “impoundment.” That legal theory holds that when lawmakers pass appropriations to fulfill their duties laid out in Article I of the Constitution, they simply set a spending ceiling, but not a floor.

The president, the logic goes, can simply decide not to spend money on anything he deems unnecessary, because Article II of the Constitution gives the president the role of executing the laws that Congress passes.

Congress acted during Richard Nixon's presidency to reject "impoundment" theory. But Trump's circle wants to challenge that – potentially setting up a constitutional fight that would require the Supreme Court to weigh in.

Vought did not venture into impoundment in his Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote that the president "should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”

As Will Stancil explained, "by freezing all federal grants, trump is fundamentally transforming the relationship between the executive and congress. he is asserting dictatorial authority over federal spending, transforming congress's lawmaking powers into advisory authority. it is a constitutional crisis."

In order to understand where this is going, we need to pay attention to what Rachel Maddow reported about Vice-President J.D. Vance and his affection for a man named Curtis Yarvin. My hope would be that every American would watch this clip and understand why Trump recently attacked Maddow specifically.

J.D. Vance says that "Step one in the process is to totally rip out like a tumor the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American political religion."

When asked by the host what that would look like, since elections are ineffectual, Vance brings up his buddy Curtis Yarvin.

Maddow then shows a clip of Yarvin saying that our government has gotten stale and needs to be deleted. That would include deleting NGO's and universities. The end game is pretty clear.

In the place of a deleted government, Yarvin says that we should install a "national CEO," otherwise known as a dictator. He then says that "if Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia."

When Stancil says that we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis, it is because Trump is setting himself up as the dictator in charge of everything, totally ignoring the Constitution's clarity about the role of Congress. 

Between illegally firing Inspectors General and illegally impounding Congressionally appropriated spending and setting his militia free and purging the Justice Department and unleashing the ethnic cleansing police, I’m starting to think that “just for one day” might not have been on the level.

— Jacob T. Levy (@jacobtlevy.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 7:54 AM

But it might not simply be Congress they are prepared to ignore. In one of the clips from Vance's interview with Jack Murphy that Maddow didn't expose, the vice president said this:

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”...

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

It is unclear whether a Supreme Court that has been stacked with Trump loyalists would stand in the way of the administration's assumption of these dictatorial powers. But even if they do, the Vice President of the United States has indicated that they would defy the court.  

We've already gone pretty far down the rabbit hole of tyranny in just eight days. The only question remaining is whether enough Americans have actually gotten over their dictator phobia?

The White House instigated tensions with Colombia, then Trump escalated the whole thing.

Perhaps you heard that, on Sunday, the U.S. almost entered a trade war with Colombia. Things have settled down now, but both right wing and major news media got the story wrong. For example, this is what we saw from the New York Times:

To correct the record, here's a timeline of how this whole mess unfolded.

Friday, January 24th

As I noted previously, the Trump administration hasn't ramped up their "mass deportation" plans...yet. But they're eager to look as threatening as possible. So on Friday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt went on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter to announce that "Deportation flights have begun." Accompanying her tweet was a picture of shackled migrants boarding a military cargo plane. This is the image the White House wanted everyone to see:

Saturday, January 25th

The Brazilian government expressed outrage over the inhumane treatment of migrants who were deported to Manaus. For example:

Edgar Da Silva Moura, a 31-year-old computer technician, was on the flight, after seven months in detention in the United States.

"On the plane they didn't give us water, we were tied hands and feet, they wouldn't even let us go to the bathroom," he told AFP.

"It was very hot, some people fainted."

Sunday, January 26th 

After watching all of that unfold, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro refused to allow a military cargo plane with deportees to land in his country, saying that the U.S. cannot treat Columbian migrants as criminals. 

"A migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves," Petro said. "That is why I returned the U.S. military planes that were carrying Colombian migrants... In civilian planes, without being treated like criminals, we will receive our fellow citizens."

It is important to note that, during the Biden administration, Columbia allowed 475 deportation flights from the U.S. - so none of this was about returning the migrants. It was all about how the Trump administration was treating them.

As we all know by now, with Donald Trump, cruelty is the point. So instead of working diplomatically with one of our allies, the president resorted to threats and punishment - imposing tariffs, travel bans, and sanctions. 

Petro responded with a screed of his own, promising retaliatory tariffs on anything imported from the U.S. 

In the end, however, an agreement was reached. Of course, the White House took a victory lap claiming that "The Government of Colombia has agreed to all of President Trump’s terms." Columiba's foreign ministry released a statement suggesting that "the government would accept all deportation flights and 'guarantee dignified conditions' for those Colombians on board."

So what we got was bellicose threats on social media and a bit of diplomacy behind the scenes. But that's now how it's being reported. In the U.S. media, Petro bowed to Trump, while in Latin America, the opposite is true. The title of the linked article is: "Petro faces Trump and wins first arm wrestling match. American backed down," according to Google translates.  

Based on the timeline of how all of this played out, my take would be that Trump instigated the tension and then escalated the situation when Petro responded. The two then had a bit of a d*ck-swinging contest, but cooler heads warded off a crisis behind the scenes. 

ICE raids are already sorting workers by race

Heather Cox Richardson shared some helpful advice about how to survive in these trying times.

I suspect that the hardest part for a lot of us will be to avoid trying to do it all - thereby chasing the chaos - and limit ourselves to 1-2 issues or projects. But that's my plan and we'll see how it goes. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the issues I'll be tracking is the administration's plan for mass deportations. While it's true that Trump signed a bunch of executive orders on that topic, not much has changed...yet. As Patrick Reis explained, that's because they'll need a huge infusion of cash.

Throughout the campaign, experts cautioned that deportations on the scale Trump was promising — and his team wants to deliver — would require massive spending on ICE agents and detention facilities. Republicans in Congress are promising to deliver those resources. But none of that means they can do it right away.

Even so, with a few of the raids that were conducted this week, we see some ominous signs. For example, on Thursday ICE raided a seafood store in New Jersey. While most of the discussion about that one has focused on the fact that they didn't have a warrant and detained a U.S. military veteran, the store owner Luis Janota, described how these kinds of raids will go down (emphasis mine). 

"It looked to me like they were specifically going after certain kinds of people — not every kind, because they did not ask me for documentation for my American workers, Portuguese workers, or white workers,” Janota said.

I was immediately reminded of how workers were "sorted by race or ethnicity" during an ICE raid in Laurel, MS conducted at the end of the George W. Bush administration. So if ICE workers think you look white...no problem. No such luck if you're brown-skinned.  

In the southwest, the same thing is happening, with Native Americans in the crosshairs.

Since President Donald Trump issued his executive order for an increase in ICE raids, Navajo tribal leaders have received alarming reports that their tribal members are being detained, heightening uncertainties over the implications these actions have for their communities and the safety of their people.

“We now know that Navajo people and enrolled members of other tribes are being detained in Phoenix and other cities by ICE,” Navajo Nation Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley said during a committee meeting on Thursday.

As the Washington Post reported back in 2016, Trump has a "long history of clashes with Native Americans" - mostly centered on his involvement with casinos. That's why red flags started waving when his lawyers submitted arguments to the court on his executive order ending birthright citizenship that included this:

“The United States’ connection with the children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors is weaker than its connection with members of Indian tribes,” DOJ argued in a filing. “If the latter link is insufficient for birthright citizenship, the former certainly is,” the Trump administration argued.”

In case you're wondering where that one came from, here you go:

The DOJ cited an 1884 U.S. Supreme Court case, Elk v. Wilkins, in which the high court decided that “because members of Indian tribes owe ‘immediate allegiance’ to their tribes, they are not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are not constitutionally entitled to Citizenship.”

But the DOJ ignored congressional action, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, that explicitly gave Indigenous people U.S. birthright citizenship and effectively ended the rejection of citizenship that the Supreme Court had upheld four decades earlier.

Just as Alito took us back to the 19th century to justify overturning Roe vs Wade, Trump's lawyers are hinting that perhaps we should go back to the same time period to revoke the citizenship of Native Americans. 

All of this is to suggest what is coming down the pike for those with black/brown skin - regardless of citizenship status. The Trump administration is putting a target on your back. 

It is beyond time for those of us who are white-skinned to chose a side.

Whose Christianity is MAGA embracing?

By now I'm sure you've seen the sermon delivered by Bishop Mariann Budde at the National Cathedral. But I want to make sure that it is recorded here at my little space on the internet. 

While many of us found courage and hope in these words, Donald Trump and his enablers went on the attack. The president called Bishop Budde "a Radical Left hard line Trump hater" and demanded an apology. Speaker Mike Johnson, who claims to base his politics on the Bible, accused her of hijacking the National Prayer Service to promote her radical ideology. Fox News went after Budde for going on a "far left woke tirade," referred to her sermon as "the rantings of a lunatic" and called her a heretic. 

Watching all of that, I was reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave in 2008 about the role of religion in politics - especially the first couple of minutes in this clip:

Even if we only had Christians in our midst - if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America - whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would it be James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?

The lie that Christian Nationalists tell themselves is that their interpretation of Christianity is the only one ordained by God and everyone else is a heretic. That is how Bishop Budde is expelled from their tight circle of "us vs. them."

The one word all of these MAGA folks use to describe Budde that is actually accurate is when they call her a "radical." She asked the President of the United States to show mercy and compassion to people who are afraid. That call comes right out of the radical words Jesus spoke.

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Those who call for the United States to be a Christian nation are enraged that a pastor called on the president to embrace what Jesus taught. As Asha Rangappa noted, "appeals to kindness, love, decency, and mercy make MAGA outraged."

I am reminded of the fact that two years ago, while MAGA was railing against critical race theory being taught in schools, they extended that vitriol to "social emotional learning." Here is an example of the kind of curriculum they opposed.

Parents involved with Moms for Liberty claimed that this teaching went against their Christian values because it teaches compassion - and for them, “not every human is deserving of my child’s empathy.” One has to wonder who this parent thinks is worthy of their child's empathy and who is not. 

Since I actually believe in free speech and religious freedom, I'm not here to judge or silence the people who actually believe that. But I'll also defend Bishop Budde and her right to speak about her faith.

On that one, I align myself with Jesus (see Beatitudes above). Also, Rev. Martin Luther King.

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the inter-related structure of reality.

Finally, remember that speech Barack Obama gave at the 2004 Democratic Convention? Here's what he had to say:

...for alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we’re all connected as one people. If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

It is that fundamental belief -- It is that fundamental belief: I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.

E pluribus unum: "Out of many, one."

I find it shocking that in 2025, we actually need to have a conversation about the role of mercy, compassion, and empathy in our pluralistic democracy. But here we are. As the Coffee Talk lady would say..."talk among yourselves." My suggestion would be to start here:

We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. ..

The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence.

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

They want us all to be so overwhelmed that the whole idea of resistance seems pointless

Cartoon by Haitian artist Watson Mere

If you feel like you woke up in one country yesterday and went to bed in a whole different one, then you're not alone. There is good reason to be afraid. 

The new president signed 26 executive orders on Monday and you can find a pretty good run-down of them here. Members of his administration called this "shock and awe." But I prefer the phrase Steve Bannon used back in 2018 - "flooding the zone with shit" - because it is a better fit for what these guys are actually doing, as Josh Marshall explained.

The point of all of this is to create the apparently overwhelming and unchallengeable feeling that Trump is all-powerful, that his team is all-knowing and have everything figured out, and that nothing can stop him.

In other words, the president is once again attempting to use what Marshall described as "dominance politics" (emphasis mine).

Part of making sense of the current Trump campaign is understanding that Trump is continually trying to take the hyper-aggressive bullyboy tactics he learned from his father in the New York City real estate world and apply them to national politics. That style might fairly be described as sell, sell, sell and attack, attack, attack. In particular, as a New York City real estate pro described here, it’s largely about getting inside other people’s heads with over-the-top aggression that knocks them on their heels and leaves them unprepared to fight back. Some of this is simply what I’ve called “dominance politics”, an idea I’ve developed in various posts over the years, and which I described back in March as being based on “the inherent appeal of power and the ability to dominate others.”

That's the play. They want us all to be so overwhelmed that the whole idea of resistance seems pointless. 

So while there's good reason to be afraid of what's happening to our country, we also have to be clear-minded when it comes to figuring out how to respond. 

The fact is that people are going to suffer as a result of the 2024 election. For example, it's already started: 

That's just the beginning. Other examples will take days, weeks, months, and even years to unfold. There's no denying that things are going to get bad. 

The challenge for all of us is to acknowledge the darkness that is descending without letting it immobilize us. That's a journey that each of us must take individually. So wherever you need to go on that journey...I wish you godspeed.

One of the most ironic things about Monday was the fact that it was also the day we celebrate the birth of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The kind of "dominance politics" we're seeing from Trump is similar to what white southerners inflicted on African Americans during King's lifetime.

Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.

So today, my journey is leading me to ponder this thought from one of our greatest citizens:

I'm not sure where faith comes from in a dark moment like this. But I do know that people like MLK faced a mountain of despair that is far beyond anything I've ever experienced. My task is to learn how to turn that into a stone of hope.

The Republican plan to hurt low-to-middle income Americans

It's now official. For Trump's inauguration on Monday, his oligarch friends and associates will sit inside the Capitol Rotunda to watch the spectacle, while his MAGA supporters are left outside in the cold. That is the perfect metaphor for what is about to happen as Republicans take control of the federal budget. 

When it comes to spending, the Biden administration focused on getting us through the pandemic, building infrastructure, combating climate change, and "growing the economy from the bottom up and middle out."

On the other hand, Trump's spending priorities are to (1) extend the 2017 tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, and (2) implement his plans for mass deportation. The former will cost $4.5 trillion over 10 years and the price tag for the latter is $968 billion. 

In order to keep up the pretense that the GOP is the party of fiscal conservatism, congressional Republicans are looking for ways to offset that massive increase in spending.  Of course, one of their top priorities is to repeal any gains made during the Biden administration on things like health care and climate change. 

Their biggest offset, however, is to embrace Trump's 10% consumer tax (ie, tariff) on all imported goods. Here's how that tax will effect various income groups:

Another big target for Republican offsets is a huge reduction to Medicaid. Just to be clear, here is a summary of Medicare beneficiaries:

Medicaid covers 41% of all births in the United States, nearly half of children with special health care needs, five in eight nursing home residents, 23% of non-elderly adults with any mental illness, and 40% of non-elderly adults with HIV...

Among the non-elderly covered by Medicaid, half are children under age 19; six in ten are people of color, 57% are female; and seven in ten are in a family with a full or part-time worker.

Republicans are looking at cutting up to 1/3 of Medicaid spending over the next 10 years. Since individual states run their own Medicaid programs, they will have to decide whether to raise taxes to cover the losses or cut benefits. 

There are a couple of lists that Republicans are floating on these potential cuts. The latest one has a long list of possibilities that would hurt the average American, but two stood out to me.

First of all, they are proposing to eliminate the home mortgage interest deduction - perhaps the most significant way that purchasing a home is made affordable for middle class buyers. This is coming just as the sale of previously occupied homes hit a 14-year low. 

Secondly, Republicans want to eliminate the non-profit status for hospitals - forcing them to pay taxes and eliminating the tax deduction for charitable contributions. Over 60% of hospitals in this country are non-profit - many supported by churches. Even more importantly, this comes at a time when many hospitals (especially in rural areas) are shutting down due to persistent financial losses. 

Overall, every single spending cut proposed by Republicans is designed to hurt low-to-middle income Americans. 

Years ago, Jim Wallis rightly suggested that budgets are moral documents. It was another way of saying, "pay attention to what I do, not what I say." So while our oligarchs (who have been assured that they'll keep their tax cuts) are cozying up to Trump, his MAGA buddies in Congress are preparing to stick it to the rest of us. 

Some of us have never believed the lie that Trump's Republican Party was about populism. How much more obvious can they be?

Why I'll be listening to the prophet comedians

As we watch major media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times bow to the incoming Trump administration, it becomes difficult to image how reality (ie, the facts) will be presented to the public. While I'm happy to give a shout-out to publications (like Talking Points Memo and Rolling Stone) as well as a whole host of substackers for stepping up to the plate, there's one group that is rarely mentioned when discussing the truth-tellers. 

Ironically, I was reminded of them by the right wing outlet know as "Newsbusters." 

From the beginning of June through the end of December, the late night comedy shows welcomed 120 liberal guests and only one conservative, according to a new NewsBusters study...

The study looked at the five daily late night comedy shows: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.

Right on cue, the President-Elect of the United States went on social media last night to rant about one of those comedians - Seth Meyers. 

In case you're wondering what Meyers said that triggered Trump, this is probably the episode that did it:

As is often the case with these kinds of monologues, Meyers sprinkled his jokes with some pretty heavy-duty fact-checking on the president's lies. That's also why Trump has repeatedly attacked the other late-night comedians - especially Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. 

For years now I've been saying that comedians like these are prophets. If you doubt that, I'd simply remind you of Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006. 

One of the ways I'll be coping with whatever comes our way over the next four years is to listen to the prophet comedians among us. 

Who are you going to believe? The guy who started the lie about immigrants eating pets, or the facts?

On Sunday, when asked how the incoming administration would handle issues like immigration, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance told a whopper of a lie.

JD Vance: President Biden has left us an absolute dumpster fire… pic.twitter.com/6dwzXsPqSI

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 12, 2025

A dumpster fire? Really? 

When it comes to specifics, Vance mentioned depleted FEMA funds, a wide open southern border, rising oil prices, rising bond yields, and the federal deficit. Here are some facts about those issue:

FEMA funds 

The current tally for billion-dollar extreme weather disasters in the US is hovering around 23 or 24 so far this year, according to Adam Smith, a climatologist with NOAA who helps compile the government’s count of expensive extreme weather disasters. That number is unofficial and likely to change, but it includes hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton, and it could possibly grow to add a separate complex of earlier severe summer storms.

“This is the most open disasters that I have seen with FEMA, and it’s because we’re seeing an increase in the number of events,” Criswell said Wednesday. “We had an incredibly busy tornado season earlier this year. We had catastrophic and historic levels of flooding across many states this spring as well. We’ve had wildfires across much of the West.”

In other words, climate change is turning "weather events" into "billion-dollar extreme weather disasters." While MAGA is content to blame all of that on DEI, government regulation, and Democrats, the toll that will take on FEMA will continue to rise. 

Wide open southern border 

The number of migrants arrested illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in December was lower than when President-elect Donald Trump ended his first term in 2020, according to preliminary figures shared with Reuters, a relative calm that Trump could upend with sweeping changes.

Rising oil prices 

Oil extended gains for a third session on Monday, with Brent crude rising above $80 a barrel to its highest in more than four months, driven by wider U.S. sanctions on Russian oil and the expected effects on exports to top buyers India and China.

Those sanctions were just imposed on Friday. Here's the longer-term picture on oil prices: 

Find more statistics at Statista

Bond yields

According to Paul Krugman:

[I]ncreases in long-term rates, like the 10-year Treasury rate, might reflect the horrible, creeping suspicion that Donald Trump actually believes the crazy things he says about economic policy and will act on those beliefs...What does this have to do with interest rates? There’s near-unanimity among economists that Trump’s announced agenda of high tariffs, tax cuts and mass deportations would be highly inflationary.

Federal deficit 

But those facts don't even begin to address the level of Vance's lie. Contrary to the idea that Biden is leaving a dumpster fire, Peter Baker documented that "by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden...is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001."

• for the first time in 24 years, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day, 
• murders are way down, 
• roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century, 
• jobs are up, 
• wages are rising, 
• domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been, 
• the manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush, 
• drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years, and
• inflation...has returned to normal.

According to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, "President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets."

Here's the question facing Americans: Who are you going to believe? The guy who started the lie about immigrants eating pets, or the facts? The idea that our politics these days comes down to how someone answers that question is enough to drive us all mad. 

Why MAGA will never reach the "find out" phase

As Trump and his shadow president Elon Musk break every promise they've made to voters, a lot of liberals claimed that MAGA was about to reach the "find out" phase of FAFO. But it isn't going to happen. 

To understand, all we have to do is look at the response to the horrific fires in and around Los Angeles. Here's what's happening:

Climate change has made the vegetation that's driving the LA fires more ready to burn, scientists say.

While the flames are being mainly driven by powerful winds, the new study says that rapid swings between wet and dry years are making trees, shrubs and grasses more vulnerable to ignition.

This "hydroclimate whiplash" has seen decades of drought in California followed by extremely heavy rainfall for two years but then it flipped again to very dry conditions this autumn and winter.

The authors say that climate change has boosted these type of whiplash conditions globally by 31-66% since the middle of the 20th Century.

But that information comes from "scientists," the very people that Trump and MAGA have demonized on everything from climate change to covid. 

So Trump took to his social media site to blame California's governor, writing: "Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California...He is the [sic] blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!”

Meanwhile, on the site formerly known as Twitter, Musk blamed government regulations, LA Mayor Karen Bass, DEI policies, LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley,  and, of course, Gov. Gavin Newsom.  Musk even went so far as to agree with Alex Jones, who said that the LA fires were "part of a larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize the United States before triggering total collapse."

In summary, they're blaming anyone to the left of MAGA.

Yes https://t.co/jNTwxoXZzI

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2025

Everything Trump/Musk said was a lie. For example, there is no such thing as the "water restoration declaration" and LA doesn't get its water from the North.  Musk's claim that Mayor Bass cut the firefighting budget is also a lie.

That assertion is wrong. The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle...

The fact that they're lying won't matter to MAGA - who tend to buy everything these idiots say. So rather than a wake-up call about the dangers of climate change, about half the country will blame Democrats and/or liberals for the devastation these fires unleash.

This is exactly what we can expect for the next four years. Trump's presidency will be a time of crisis and chaos. But rather than deal with the situation, Trump will exhibit the same response we've seen from him over and over again. 

[H]ere is the way in which Donald Trump exhibits behaviors associated with a severe personality disorder. He fabricates a world in which he is both dominant and successful. When challenged, he diverts with outrageous lies designed to blame a villain and distract us from his failures. He then assumes we’ll all move on to the next fabrication of his dominance and success.

Lie, distract, and blame...that's what Trump does. It will only get worse this time around as Musk broadcasts the blame game across his social media platform. In the end, rather than hold the president and his oligarchs accountable, MAGA will blame all of their failures on the left.  

The Rosewood Massacre: Does anyone else feel like history is about to repeat itself?

On this day in 1923, a mob of over 200 white men attacked the Black community in Rosewood, Florida, killing over 30 Black women, men, and children, burning the town to the ground, and forcing all survivors to permanently flee Rosewood.

That was just one of many massacres of Black people in this country.

To that we must add the "4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950."

That's just part of our history that MAGA wants to whitewash. We participate in that when we confine our discussions of the Jim Crow era to talk about segregation. As Hamden Rice once explained.

It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.

I thought about that quote from Rice as I read the ProPublica story by Joshua Kaplan about a wilderness survival trainer that spent years undercover with right-wing militias. The whole report is fascinating. But one of the things that stood out to me was that the ranks of these militias were devastated by the prosecution and imprisonment of those involved in the January 6th riot. 

They'll obviously get a huge boost when Donald Trump pardons all of them. According to Kaplan, the militias have already been active on our southern border terrorizing immigrants. But they're now gearing up to play an active role in the administration's mass deportation plan. That's like asking the KKK to police segregation in the Jim Crow south. 

Does anyone else feel like history might be about to repeat itself? 

An explosion of violence fueled by hate

Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall recently took note of the fact that political violence has been on the rise over the last couple of months. For example, 

• the terrorist attack in New Orleans,
• the cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas
• the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO
the biggest collection of homemade explosive devices in the FBI's history was found at a home outside Norfolk, Virginia.

Noting this country's long history of political violence, Marshall tried to unravel the threads of what is going on. He suggests that it is a general disinhibition for violence that is the culprit. 

I was reminded of something President Biden said a couple of years ago.

Hate never goes away. It only hides.

White supremacy and hate-fueled violence have no place in America. pic.twitter.com/zGySbv3NGl

— President Biden (@POTUS) September 20, 2022

Hate never fully goes away. And when given any oxygen,  it comes out from under the rocks. In the last few years, we've given it too much oxygen in our politics, in our media, and on the internet. Too much hate, all for power and profit. Too much hate that fueled extremist violence, that's been allowed to fester and grow.

Twenty years ago, Derrick Jensen wrote something similar in his book, "The Culture of Make Believe" (emphasis mine).

Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, "normal," chronic state—where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised—to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized.

Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remains underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.

That's why it is important to note that, in response to the recent incidents of violence, Trump and his enablers are responding with even more hate. 

They're too busy blaming the violence on their usual targets - Biden, immigrants, DEI and public schools - to notice the facts of each case. 

But as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said, it goes even deeper than an attempt to level blame. He tweeted that Trump is "going to use episodes of violence to justify his crack down on immigrants and his attack on dissent - whether the facts line up or not." He followed that up with this prediction: 

In the coming days, watch for autocracy-fetishizing MAGA figures who call on Trump to use "emergency powers" or "domestic war powers" (i.e. some form of martial law) to confront domestic terrorism.

They aren't out to destroy terrorists. They're out to destroy the rule of law.

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 3, 2025

So here's the pattern: Unleash the hate by rhetorically giving it oxygen. When it leads to violence, use that as an excuse to declare martial law against both immigrants and any form of dissent. 

I hope to god that I'm overreacting. But Murphy is hardly the hair-raising type. To add to the alarm, Bret Bair recently said that he's been told to expect "shock and awe" on day one of Trump's presidency. As a reminder, here's what it looked like the last time a presidential administration used that phrase: