Sorry, Senor Santayana: Those who forever do not care about the past are certain to blame the blameless when things go sideways.
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November 10, 2024 (Sunday)
In 1918, at the end of four years of World War I’s devastation, leaders negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was not technically the end of the war, which came with the Treaty of Versailles. Leaders signed that treaty on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the conflict. But the armistice declared on November 11 held, and Armistice Day became popularly known as the day “The Great War,” which killed at least 40 million people, ended.
In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commemorated Armistice Day, saying that Americans would reflect on the anniversary of the armistice “with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations….”
But Wilson was disappointed that the soldiers’ sacrifices had not changed the nation’s approach to international affairs. The Senate, under the leadership of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts—who had been determined to weaken Wilson as soon as the imperatives of the war had fallen away—refused to permit the United States to join the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild: a forum for countries to work out their differences with diplomacy, rather than resorting to bloodshed.
On November 10, 1923, just four years after he had established Armistice Day, former President Wilson spoke to the American people over the new medium of radio, giving the nation’s first live, nationwide broadcast.
“The anniversary of Armistice Day should stir us to a great exaltation of spirit,” he said, as Americans remembered that it was their example that had “by those early days of that never to be forgotten November, lifted the nations of the world to the lofty levels of vision and achievement upon which the great war for democracy and right was fought and won.”
But he lamented “the shameful fact that when victory was won,…chiefly by the indomitable spirit and ungrudging sacrifices of our own incomparable soldiers[,] we turned our backs upon our associates and refused to bear any responsible part in the administration of peace, or the firm and permanent establishment of the results of the war—won at so terrible a cost of life and treasure—and withdrew into a sullen and selfish isolation which is deeply ignoble because manifestly cowardly and dishonorable.”
Wilson said that a return to engagement with international affairs was “inevitable”; the U.S. eventually would have to take up its “true part in the affairs of the world.”
Congress didn’t want to hear it. In 1926 it passed a resolution noting that since November 11, 1918, “marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed,” the anniversary of that date “should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”
In 1938, Congress made November 11 a legal holiday to be dedicated to world peace.
But neither the “war to end all wars” nor the commemorations of it, ended war.
Just three years after Congress made Armistice Day a holiday for peace, American armed forces were fighting a second world war, even more devastating than the first. The carnage of World War II gave power to the idea of trying to stop wars by establishing a rules-based international order. Rather than trying to push their own boundaries and interests whenever they could gain advantage, countries agreed to abide by a series of rules that promoted peace, economic cooperation, and security.
The new international system provided forums for countries to discuss their differences—like the United Nations, founded in 1945—and mechanisms for them to protect each other, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, which has a mutual defense pact that says any attack on a NATO country will be considered an attack on all of them.
In the years since, those agreements multiplied and were deepened and broadened to include more countries and more ties. While the U.S. and other countries sometimes fail to honor them, their central theory remains important: no country should be able to attack a neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. This concept preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century, but it is a concept that is currently under attack as autocrats increasingly reject the idea of a rules-based international order and claim the right to act however they wish.
In 1954, to honor the armed forces of wars after World War I, Congress amended the law creating Armistice Day by striking out the word “armistice” and putting “veterans” in its place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and who had become a five-star general of the Army before his political career, later issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe Veterans Day:
“[L]et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”
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November 11, 2024 (Monday)
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”
Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power.
The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.
In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.
Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.
Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”
Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.
In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: “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.” Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces.
Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.
The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.
Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not.
Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.
Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate.
Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.
Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.
All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.
While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.
The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship?
Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.
In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.
One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”
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November 12, 2024 (Tuesday)
The backdrop for today’s news is that Republicans in the Senate will vote by secret ballot tomorrow for a new Senate majority leader. That person will control the Senate calendar, deciding what measures will be taken up by the Senate for consideration and thus wielding power over Trump’s legislative plans.
Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with MAGA leaders and influencers, are backing Florida senator Rick Scott, who has signaled a willingness to do whatever Trump wants. Senators John Thune (R-SD) and John Cornyn (R-TX) are also staunch party members but are not as closely associated with the MAGA faction of the party.
MAGA control of the Senate is at stake, and Trump and his team are pushing their extremist agenda so aggressively it will be impossible for Senate Republicans to pretend they didn’t know what was at stake if they vote to empower the MAGAs.
Today the Trump transition team floated the idea that Trump could sign an executive order creating a board of retired senior military personnel that would review high-ranking officers and recommend removing any they deemed unfit for leadership. Vivian Salama, Nancy A. Youssef, and Lara Seligman reported in the Wall Street Journal that such a board would enable Trump to purge the military of the generals whom he considers insufficiently loyal to him. Generals who refused to carry out what they considered unconstitutional orders—including using the military against U.S. civilians—infuriated Trump during his first term.
The chairman of VoteVets, retired major general Paul Eaton, warned that such a plan would turn the U.S. military into Trump loyalists. Eaton also warned military personnel what that would mean for the troops, suggesting that folks should “take a look at Stalin’s officer purges in early WWII that resulted in the Soviet, now-Russian Army, enduring incompetence and the use of its rank-and-file troops as cannon meat. The American military is the envy of the world’s militaries, given its efficiency for military effect and stunningly low casualty count. Probably a good model to keep.”
Transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “[T]he American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.” But Trump’s claims of a mandate are wrong. As vote counts continue to come in, it appears that Trump’s margin of victory was actually quite slim.
Trump has also vowed to eliminate the Biden administration’s policies to address climate change, promising to “drill, baby, drill” and make the U.S. energy independent by increasing production of fossil fuels. In fact, the production of oil and gas hit an all-time high during the Biden administration and the U.S. exports those products, but so long as the U.S is tied to fossil fuels, it will likely always import them because the oil it exports is a different kind than it uses.
It is not clear that even MAGA Republicans want to kill the green energy initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act that have brought new factories and good jobs to more Republican-dominated states than Democratic-dominated states.
Today, chair and chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil Darren Woods asked the incoming administration not to change Biden’s climate policy dramatically, saying that the lack of consistency on climate change is bad for the economy. “I don’t think the challenge or the need to address global emissions is going to go away,” he said. “Anything that happens in the short term would just make the longer term that much more challenging.”
Exxon has invested heavily in the carbon capture industry. In 2023, Woods predicted that the company’s low-carbon business could generate more money than its traditional oil and gas products in as little as a decade, telling investors he expects carbon capture to be a multitrillion-dollar business.
Trump and his team, apparently led by Elon Musk, have begun to float names for different administration posts, all of whom appear to be picked to replace nonpartisan federal experts with right-wing culture warriors.
For secretary of homeland security, Trump has proposed loyalist Kristi Noem, currently governor of South Dakota. Noem had been under consideration for vice president, but fell out of the running after boasting that she had shot her dog for misbehaving. Earlier this year, Noem appeared to suggest that Texas, which became a state in 1845, was one of the original signatories to the Constitution. She has been a Trump loyalist focusing on the border.
For U.S. ambassador to Israel, Trump has picked former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who denies Palestinian rights to the West Bank, instead supporting Israeli settlements in that land and saying that “Israel has title deed” there, calling the area by the biblical name “Judea and Samaria.”
For secretary of defense, Trump has tapped Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, a combat veteran and host of the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, a show Trump reportedly enjoys. As national security expert Tom Nichols points out, the Secretary of Defense has access to the nuclear command-and-control procedure. The secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion.
Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. He became popularly known after accidentally hitting a man with an ax on the Fox & Friends show in 2015. Then, in 2019, he regained notoriety when he volunteered that he had not washed his hands in ten years because he does not believe germs are real. Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.”
Lolita C. Baldor and Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported that the news that Trump has tapped the inexperienced Hegseth to run the world’s largest and most powerful military “stunned the Pentagon and the broader defense world.” While some Republicans say they look forward to getting to know him better, others appear to share the Pentagon’s concerns.
But the news that Trump wants a Fox News Channel host in one of the most important positions in the United States government got overtaken quickly by Trump’s announcement that “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy,” an entrepreneur who challenged Trump for the presidential nomination, will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” under his administration. Their advice will, Trump announced, “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Their project is nicknamed “DOGE,” an apparent reference to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency and meme coin, known as “Dogecoin.” That cryptocurrency surged after the announcement of the new DOGE under Trump, adding to the gains of 153% since Election Day.
By law, a president does not have the power to create a new department or agency, and participating in one would require Musk and Ramaswamy to get rid of their conflicts of interest.
Trump’s announcement said that Musk and Ramaswamy would “work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE.’ Their work will conclude no later than 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. I am confident they will succeed!”
Trump appears to see himself as the founder of a new United States of America while, ironically, the real winners of the chaos he is ushering into the government will be Russia, China, and the other autocratic states eager to dismantle American democracy.
Trump’s demonstration of his plans just before Senate Republicans have to choose their leader seems an attempt to jam those who might stand against him into his camp. And yet, the Framers of the Constitution believed that the Senate would be the key guardrail to stop the rise of an autocrat who would destroy democracy and install himself as a king. They expected that the determination of senators to guard their own power would protect the nation.
Almost two hundred and fifty years into their experiment, we’re about to find out if they were right.
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Basically Trump’s appointments are happening faster than last time but are also somehow worse/more incompetent. Sounds pretty much like everyone with a brain expected.
I look forward to them being unable to find their ass with both hands and a map, and when they do something that causes Trump pain, being fired and then being declared “the worst ever”.
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I have a different explanation for that, and it came straight from T****’s mouth. He didn’t care if people voted for him - he made that clear with his comments about “having a little secret.” In the same rally, he said that people needed to vote for his chosen MAGA congresspeople. He said, they don’t need to vote for him, just vote for congress, vote for the House, for the Senate. They needed Republicans to vote for MAGA candidates in Congress to support him once he had the election good and stolen.
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Pathetic little trolls. I was about to call them children but i expect better of children.
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Keep in mind, competency is no impediment to cruelty. People are going to get hurts… LOTS of people are going to get hurt, whether or not the people running the administration are competent. Bullies just bully, they don’t need to be smart or understand how the world works, because they don’t give a shit. Trump regularly went around norms when he wanted to, and he’ll do so again.
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All that is true. My hope, such as it is, is that the overwhelming hubris combined with the incompetence of the team he is putting together will result in his being less successful in pushing his agenda. Absolutely people are going to get hurt in large numbers. I can only hope these factors might decrease that number to some degree. It is really distressing to know that your main hope is in the fact that they are too arrogant to listen to the other evil people who might make the camps run more efficiently, you know?
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I agree… but I also don’t think we can count on that…
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Nope, definitely not. We should get ready to both resist however we can and help however we can those who are going to get hurt. And if we expect to be in this or that line of fire, well, we’ve been in it before.
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Case in point:
President-elect Donald Trump today announced that a new Department of Government Efficiency—or “DOGE”—will be led by Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk and Ramaswamy, who founded pharma company Roivant Sciences, “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” according to the Trump statement on Truth Social.
not enough facepalms in the world…
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There’s a lot to facepalm about this. A Department that isn’t a Department. The meme dog logo. The “leaderboard” plan. The fact another government agency already exists specifically to do this (GOA).
But the most facepalmy part of the whole thing is that the group in charge of making things more efficient…has two people in charge of it. Because it itself is inefficient.
I mean really, this is just a way to funnel more government money directly to Elon without the space contracts.
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I wonder what kind of shitfit Elbow will throw when Congress refuses to make it a Department and he has to settle for a mere Ooge.
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Thanks for posting these here. I really value her take on things, but I have a really hard time following her on Substack.
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You’re welcome. I grab them from Fbook. (obligatory disclaimer, I’m only there otherwise to stay in touch with older, farflung relatives).
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This always struck me as the obvious outcome of tariffs. Raise import duties on goods from China, there’s plenty of other places where you can find cheap labor.
Say there were universal tariffs on all goods not originating from the US, do you honestly think companies who off-shore production to save costs are going to jump at the opportunity to create new factories in the US? Of course they won’t; they will just raise prices to offset the cost. These jobs aren’t moving back to the US so people will have no choice but to pay more or stretch what they already have.
Let’s say these companies did create manufacturing jobs for their products in the US rather than raise prices to offset tariffs, who are they going to hire? People aren’t going to be fighting one another to work a minimum wage job mass-producing cheap sneakers in a US-based sweatshop, especially not when there’s already extremely low unemployment. Maybe these companies could hire undocumented immigrants? Oops, they are either in hiding or got deported by Trump’s goons and aren’t paying taxes or contributing to the economy anymore.
I’m nothing even resembling a concept of an economist, and even I know these proposals to “save our ‘crumbling’ economy” are stupid and self-sabotaging. All to avoid obvious solutions like making big corporations pay their fair share in taxes and enforce regulations to curb corporate greed.
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I think there’s a case to be made for a universal tariff rate of something like 5%. It’s a hit, it’s not the end of the world, and it’s going to be taken into account for any offshoring activity. Nothing bigger than that except for things we want to not be imported at all, like asbestos or tetraethyl lead or cadmium or whatever. Then by all means move the decimal point over at least one place. Two places over (500%) for shit like plutonium or Boer failsons. But a 60% rate for everything from a major trade partner? It’s just dumb.