I hope so. But then he’ll just find someone who’s sober, but just as awful. 
He’s bound and determined to weaponize the DoD against the American people.
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump is considering dumping Hegseth and replacing him with Ron DeSantis. Jesus fucking Christ.
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Perfect reaction, especially for, as Tromp used to call him, Ron DeSanctimonious.
There really is a lot of scum at the bottom of the barrel that Tromp is scraping.
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Santorum, in fact.
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This drives me crazy, all the people crying about, “this will give Trump all the justification he needs to pardon whomever he wants”. As if he ever sought permission or council for anything he did last time around. He just fucking did it. His entire presidency was all about shattering norms and when that wasn’t good enough, simply breaking laws with impunity.
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December 3, 2024 (Tuesday)
For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.
In an emergency address at nearly 11:00 last night local time, Yoon announced that he was declaring martial law in South Korea for the first time since 1980, when special forces under a military dictatorship attacked pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju, leaving about 200 people dead or missing. South Koreans ended military rule in their country in 1987, writing a new constitution that made South Korea a republic.
Yoon claimed he had to declare martial law because his political opponents were sympathizing with communist North Korea. It was a thin pretext.
A member of the conservative People’s Party, Yoon was elected to a five-year presidential term in 2022 after a misogynistic campaign fueled by young men who saw equal rights for women— whose average monthly wage is 67.7% of that a man, according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker—as reverse discrimination that is taking away their own rights and opportunities.
Before his election, Yoon had no experience in the National Assembly, and once he was in office, his popularity slid to record lows. In legislative elections held last April, voters crushed Yoon’s party, giving opposition parties 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. The legislature fought with Yoon over his budget and launched a number of corruption investigations into Yoon’s allies as well as his wife.
And so, Yoon declared martial law, bringing the media under his control and banning political activities, “false propaganda,” “gatherings that incite social unrest,” and strikes. Police officers formed a blockade around the National Assembly, and helicopters landed on the roof to prevent lawmakers from getting inside to overturn Yoon’s declaration.
The South Korean people reacted immediately. Reporting from Seoul, John Yoon of the New York Times recounted the story of a real estate agent who watched President Yoon’s speech, got in his car, and drove for an hour to get to the National Assembly. The man told journalist Yoon, “I thought, ‘The end has come,’ so I came out. The president of a country has exerted his power by force, and its people have come out to protest that. We have to remove him from power from this point on. He’s in a position where he has to come down.”
Editor of The Verge Sarah Jeong, who works out of the U.S. and does not cover South Korean politics, happened to be working in Seoul this week and was on site after a night of drinking, giving an informed and honest account of what she was seeing. “[T]he crowd is a pretty even mix of young people and the older folks (mostly men) who would have been young during the dictatorship…. I heard tanks were here but I haven’t seen one yet. [O]ld men swearing ‘how dare the military come here.’”
Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Washington Post Tokyo/Seoul bureau chief, reported that the National Assembly managed to pull together a majority of its members—190 of 300—in about two and a half hours to participate in a unanimous vote to overturn Yoon’s emergency declaration of martial law. That vote included members of his own party.
Political commentator Adam Schwartz shared a video taken by the leader of South Korea’s Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, as he climbed over the wall of the National Assembly to vote against Yoon’s martial law declaration. Other videos showed people in the streets boosting legislators over the walls for the vote.
Yet another video showed South Korean soldiers trying to get into the National Assembly during the voting thwarted by people wielding a fire extinguisher and flashes from cameras.
While the law said Yoon had to abide by the legislators’ vote, it was not clear whether Yoon would do as the law required. About six hours after he had declared martial law, Yoon bowed to the National Assembly and the popular will and lifted his declaration.
Yoon has been widely condemned, and South Koreans from all parties, including his own, are calling for his resignation or impeachment. Raphael Rashid of The Guardian reported today that on the morning after the attempted coup, South Koreans are bewildered and sad. “For the older generation who fought on the streets against military dictatorships, martial law equals dictatorship, not 21st century Korea. The younger generation is embarrassed that he has ruined their country’s reputation. People are baffled.”
For the rest of the world, though, South Koreans’ immediate and aggressive response to a man trying to take away their democratic rights is an inspiration. Among other things, it illustrates that for all the claims that autocracy can react to events more quickly than democracy can, in fact autocrats are brittle. It is democracy that is determined and resilient.
The events in Seoul also cemented the shift in social media from X to Bluesky, where news was breaking faster than anywhere else, in a way that echoed what Twitter used to be. Since Twitter was a key site of democratic organizing until Elon Musk bought it and renamed it X, that shift is significant.
And finally, the events in South Korea emphasize that for all people often look to larger-than-life figures to define our nations, our history is in fact made up of regular people doing the best they can. Journalist Sarah Jeong found herself entirely unexpectedly in the middle of a coup and, recognizing that she was in a historic moment, snapped to work to do all she could to keep the rest of us informed. “I’m f*cking blasted and hanging out in the weirdest scene because history happened at a deeply inconvenient hour,” she wrote on Bluesky. “[S]o it goes.”
When she finally went home, Jeong wrote: “I expensed my cab ride home. I’m tired so I put ‘korea coup’ down in the expense code field.”
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That is an amazingly hopeful story. I can only hope we learn from it.
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WTF? I think Desantis has got his own skeletons, but not as deep as Hegseth’s it seems. Desantis taught for a bit at a fancy private school up in North GA and apparently went to some of the parties the kids had… Trump wants a loyalist in the position to try and weaponize the DoD against us, it seems, so either would do that job.
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I mean Giuliani… It’s not a diagnosis but I dunno if I’ve ever seen him not drunk.
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Emphasis mine. After enabling his overreach (ignoring regulations or exploiting loopholes in procedures), refusing to hold him accountable for his crimes, and using his administration to increase their own power or profits, I see little incentive for GOP pols to change course now. Another concern is that our military and citizens who support the incoming administration might react differently to a similar attempt to seize power.
I hope so too, because the folks who are promoting authoritarian rule here are probably updating their project plan. We need to learn how to mount effective resistance in a scenario that is much more violent. Better to be prepared, because the J6 event showed us how that group responds when they don’t get what they want. Fortunately, on that day the police and military were not on the side of the mob.
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JFC is right!
while getting MoRon into DC and out of Tallahassee, the immediate thought is “oh dear dog, that is just the fucking twisted situation that gives us Matt fucking Gaetz as governor for the remainder of desantis’ term.”
i can’t even anymore.
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THIS!!!
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December 4, 2024 (Wednesday)
In 1883, as the Republican Party moved into full-throated support for the industrialists who were concentrating the nation’s wealth into their own hands while factory workers stayed above the poverty line only by working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner responded to those worried about the extremes of wealth and poverty in the country with his book What Social Classes Owe to Each Other.
Sumner concluded it was unfair that “worthy, industrious, independent, and self-supporting” men should be taxed to support those he claimed were lazy. Worse, he said, such a redistribution of wealth would destroy America by destroying individual enterprise. Sumner called for a “laissez-faire” world in which those who failed should be permitted to sink into poverty, and even to die, to keep America from becoming a land where lazy folks waited for a handout. Such people should be weeded out of society for the good of the nation.
Republicans echoed Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, concluding, as he did, that the wealthy owed the lower classes nothing. Even though “his views are singularly hard and uncompromising,” wrote the New York Times, “it is difficult to quarrel with their deductions, however one may feel one’s finer instincts hurt by their apparent cruelty.”
In contrast to those who believed government should stay out of economic affairs so individuals can amass as much wealth as they can, others looked at the growing extremes of wealth, with so-called robber barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt II building a 70-room summer “cottage” while children went to work in mines and factories, and concluded that the government must try to hold the economic playing field level to give everyone equal chance to rise to prosperity.
Prevailing opinion in the U.S. has seesawed between these two ideologies ever since.
In the Progressive Era, members of both major parties and other upstart parties turned against Sumner’s argument, working to clean up cities, establish better working conditions, provide education, and regulate food and drugs to protect consumers. After World War I, Republicans led a backlash against those regulations and the taxes necessary to pay for their enforcement. In October 1929 the unregulated stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression.
From 1933 to 1981, Americans of both parties came to agree that the government must regulate the economy and provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. They believed such intervention would stabilize society and prevent future economic disasters by protecting the rights of all individuals to have equal access to economic prosperity.
Then in 1981, the country began to back away from that idea. Incoming president Ronald Reagan echoed William Graham Sumner when he insisted that this system took tax dollars from hardworking white men and redistributed them to the undeserving. In a time of sluggish economic growth, he assured Americans that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and that tax cuts and deregulation were the way to make the economy boom.
For the next forty years, lawmakers pushed deregulation and tax cuts, privatization of infrastructure, and cuts to the bureaucracy that protected civil rights. Those forty years, from 1981 to 2021, hollowed out the middle class as about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
When he took office in January 2021, President Joe Biden set out to reverse that trend and once again use the government to level the economic playing field, returning the nation to the proven system of the years before 1981, under which the middle class had thrived. His director of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, began to break up the monopolies that had come to control the economy, while new rules at the Department of Labor expanded workers’ rights to overtime pay, and the government worked to expand access to healthcare.
Under Biden and the Democrats, Congress passed a series of laws to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Those laws used federal money to start industries that then attracted private capital—more than $1 trillion of it. According to policy researcher Jack Conness, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are already responsible for more than 135,000 of the 1.6 million construction and manufacturing jobs created during the Biden administration.
As Jennifer Rubin noted in the Washington Post today, “It is stunning, frankly, that the most successful and far-flung private-public collaboration in history—one that is transforming cities, states and regions—has gotten so little coverage from legacy media. It may be the most critical government-driven initiative since the GI Bill following World War II.”
“[T]he widespread benefits derived from this massive undertaking—for individuals, communities, national security and government itself (through increased tax revenue)—demonstrate how far superior this approach is to trickle-down economics, which slashes taxes for the rich and big corporations,” Rubin continued. “With the latter, the tax savings for corporations go to everything from stock buybacks to increased compensation for CEOs to foreign investment,” while “the cost of the tax cuts runs up the national debt at a much greater rate than a public-private approach…. Republicans deliver temporary stimulus and wind up with more debt and more income inequality.”
But in 2024, voters elected Donald Trump, who promised to reject Biden’s economic vision and resurrect the system of the years before 2021 in which a few individuals could amass as much wealth as possible. Just ten days after the election, a Texas judge overturned the Biden administration’s overtime pay rule, permitting employers to cancel the raises they gave their employees to comply with that rule.
The change in ideology is clear from Trump’s cabinet picks. While the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million, Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report noted, a week ago she estimated the worth of Trump’s roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number did not include his pick for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find.
Today, Trump added another billionaire to his roster, picking entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman as the next administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Isaacman is a close ally of billionaire Elon Musk, who aspires to colonize Mars. In a post on X after the announcement, Isaacman vowed to “usher in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilization.”
To free up capital for such ventures, Trump’s team has promised more business deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Today, Trump tapped Paul Atkins, who has called for looser regulation of cryptocurrency, to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission. Atkins is expected to roll back the financial regulations initiated by his predecessor.
Trump has also vowed to cut the post–World War II government far more than anyone before him has done. He has put Musk and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE); Musk proposes to cut $2 trillion out of the $6.75 trillion U.S. budget. How he would accomplish this is hard to imagine, since most of the budget is “mandatory” spending already baked into the budget, and much of that is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. During the campaign, Trump promised he would not cut these very popular programs.
One of the things that constitute “discretionary” spending—which must be renewed every year—is veterans’ benefits, and yesterday Jeff Schogol of Task and Purpose noted “a growing chorus” calling for cuts to Veterans Affairs disability benefits after The Economist on November 28 called disability benefits “absurdly generous.” Disabled American Veterans spokesperson Dan Clare pointed out that the U.S. was at war for twenty years—in Afghanistan for twenty and in Iraq for eight—increasing the VA budget. Since Congress passed the PACT Act, formally known as the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, in 2022, more than 1.2 million veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxics have been treated for resulting health conditions.
Today, Phil Galewitz of KFF Health News noted that nine states—Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia—have trigger laws to end their expansion of Medicaid if federal funding is reduced. As many as 3.7 million people in these states would lose healthcare coverage if these laws go into effect. Other states might then follow suit as lost federal money would have to be made up by the states.
On X this week, Musk commented that a thread by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) attacking Social Security was “interesting.” Yesterday on the Fox News Channel, Representative Richard McCormick (R-GA) suggested: “We’re gonna have to have some hard decisions. We’re gonna have to bring in the Democrats to talk about Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved, and we know how to do it; we just have to have the stomach to take those challenges on.”
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I will just sit to the side and wait for the “wait, what!?!?!?” response from elderly MAGAts and others who directly voted for their own deaths. “They were supposed to go after the Blacks and browns, not us!” will be heard all around. I feel like I will have great difficulty sympathizing.
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A much-belated thank you to you for introducing me to this author.
Right after the election, hers was the only voice in the news that I could read without feeling frustrated and enraged and anxious. She doesn’t sugar-coat anything, but something about her style and obviously deep knowledge makes any negative emotions her reporting dredges up feel less…powerless, I guess. She informs and arms at the same time.
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People fucked around and they’re gonna find out… Of course they were gonna cut retirement benefits… They’ve been low-key gunning for that for years now.
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Saw that coming a long way past. Most of why our retirement is built on SS being surplus beer money, not required survival income. But that is a position from great privilege, and a great number of those who voted for this shit will not have that option. Somehow, they will manage to blame it on the Dems, though.
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Yeah, absolutely. We’re both lucky in that we could build that wealth. Best case scenario, they do not cut current paying out benefits (like my mom’s) and just cut those for people who are not already drawing directly… worst case scenario, they gut the entire system, including benefits for people getting paid out now. If that happens, I hope my sister and her husband plan to step up and help my mom if she needs it… because… well… they voted for this.
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What really worries me is that they’re going to find a way to blame the inevitable disaster all of this is going to cause on Democrats. The reason they want to “bring Democrats in on this” is not just because they don’t have the votes. It’s so they can scapegoat them when everything goes to shit.
Democrats have to get better at getting information to people. Republicans are using every dirty propaganda trick in the book, and most of the media are helping them. Democrats are whispering the truth into the wind, hoping people hear it. Something has to change. I don’t know how to fix this.
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