Thanks for this very thorough take.
I’ve got him pictured now - he’s the big lunk in the ill-fitting gym-shorts.
(Which statement demeans not only my understanding of him but also myself.)
as @KeybillyJefe so beautifully understated - “disappointing” .
It’s not like the Dems can afford to lose a single sensible brain at this point.
Ah well, it’s late here, so I’ll scream into the void no longer tonight.
Yup! That was part of the charm. Here’s this 6’8" teddy bear looking dude that looks like he just got thrown out of a dive bar, appearing on TV giving brusque pressers on behalf of the state. It was a rare bit of entertainment during the dark times of 2020 when every day seemed to be worse than the last.
I was as sad as anybody to witness his eventual heel turn. Maybe those folks here who lived in PA at the time might have a different take of him, and perhaps my take is skewed by the 5 minutes a day I’d see him on TV, but that’s my perspective at least.
One thing I thought about with this earlier today. If Democrats can actually start thinking about some election history logically, we might get somewhere. Both Fetterman and Kristen Sinema ran as progressives. Sinema explicitly ran as a progressive. Fetterman never said he was, but people believed he was, and he used that image. Once elected, it quickly became clear neither were actually progressive. But these are two politicians who won statewide election to the US Senate in states that are not solid blue states. Progressive ideas and policies are popular. People will vote for them. Meanwhile, Harris, along with Senate candidates like Sherrod Brown and Colin Allred pushed to the center, or even the right on some issues, during their elections, and they all lost.
Republicans and the media have been accusing the Democrats for years of moving too far to the left, and way too many post mortems of this past election repeat that idea. But it’s a myth. Biden went left in 2020, and beat Trump. Fetterman and Sinema pretended to move left, and won. Harris, Brown, Allred, and others, moved right and lost. There’s a lesson to be learned here if the Democratic Party is open to hearing it. They need to move left. Hard left.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Republicans accusing Democratic candidates of being radical leftist socialist commies? They are going to say those things even if the Democratic candidate is pushing to end all regulations, end all taxes, and privatize government entirely. It’s no different from Republicans when they used to try to smear Democrats by calling them “liberals”.
Don’t run from the labels, embrace them, and focus on policies people actually want rather than trying to appeal to those on the right who will never come over to your side anyway. As for “appealing to the middle”, fuck them, they don’t exist.
February 5, 2025 (Wednesday)
Five years ago, on February 5, 2020, Republican senators acquitted then-president Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. Trump immediately vowed retaliation against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law for his actions. “It’s payback time,” one Republican said. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day.”
Now Trump is back in office and purging the government of those he perceives to be his enemies. His administration is purging the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the civil service of anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the president.
But it is not clear that the 78-year-old Trump is the one calling the shots. Although Trump maintained during his campaign that he had no idea what the right-wing Project 2025 was, multiple media outlets have established that most of his flurry of executive orders appear to have been lifted from the 922-page document. That document is the product of a group of far-right organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute.
This week’s threatened tariff war blew up in Trump’s face. After his vow to put tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada sent the stock market plunging, he was left declaring victory over Mexico and Canada after they essentially assured him they would do things they are already doing. In the meantime, as Carl Quintanilla noted today, Trump’s tariffs on products from China are increasing prices in the U.S.
Last night, Trump horrified even his own advisors by saying that the United States would take over Gaza and turn it into a resort area. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that Trump’s team “had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea” when Trump blurted it out. “[T]here had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal,” Swan and Haberman wrote, “let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required, or cost estimates, or even an outline of how it might work. There was little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” an idea his own officials considered “fantastical even for Mr. Trump.”
Trump’s comments were so badly received in the Middle East that Matthew Gertz of Media Matters wondered if Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered additional security for the U.S. diplomatic facilities there.
Today, Trump praised Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for coaching Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in college, although Mahomes arrived at Texas Tech after Tuberville had already left.
In his important piece “The Logic of Destruction and How to Resist It,” published February 2 in his Thinking about…, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder reflected on the president’s multiple photo ops signing executive orders to, for example, blame former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for a plane crash that happened during Trump’s term. Snyder referred to the president as “a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras.”
Today journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.
Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts.” “Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.”
Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”
Duran noted that Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed Yarvin’s prescriptions and that Trump sidekick billionaire Elon Musk appears to be putting Yarvin’s blueprint into action. “Musk is taking a systematic approach,” Duran wrote, “one that has been outlined in public forums for years.”
This morning, Anna Wilde Mathews and Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s team has accessed payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Mathews and Whyte note that CMS sits at the center of the country’s healthcare economy. In 2024, it disbursed about $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the total amount of the federal total.
On X, Musk said “this is where the big money fraud is happening.” But, in fact, CMS is not operating without oversight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates out of the Department of Justice, investigates healthcare fraud. In June 2024 it announced criminal charges against 193 defendants across 32 federal districts who allegedly participated in healthcare fraud schemes that involved about $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses.
Indeed, as Eric Levitz of Vox pointed out, “DOGE has not presented evidence of ‘fraud’; they have highlighted millions of dollars worth of spending that Musk considers wasteful. By contrast, the [General Accountability Office] identified $233 billion of fraud in 2024. We don’t need to let a billionaire ignore federal law to do government oversight[.]”
“It is extraordinary how much access Elon Musk and his sort of creepy 22-year-old henchmen have to all of our data,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told MSNBC today. “They have information that would allow them to shut down your tax refund, your Medicare payment…. Potentially, they know everything about you and your family, and the reality is that this could get dystopian very quickly…. If you were to start speaking ill of Elon Musk on social media, Elon Musk might be able to stop or delay your tax refund, or your mom’s Social Security benefit, in part because we have no window into what’s happening inside the Department of [the] Treasury right now."
While Murphy didn’t say it explicitly, control over such information also gives Musk power over business rivals and political leaders. When Musk’s team went into the Department of Labor today, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that “[h]e could manipulate quarterly job numbers and much more. We are talking about MARKET MOVING INFORMATION! Do employers want Musk to have access to any of their confidential data?”
Today, when asked about Musk’s conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had already promised that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” Donald Kettl, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hull of Bloomberg: “I don’t know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”
In a shocking attack on the intelligence personnel who collect information around the world to keep Americans safe, today the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a list of all employees the agency hired in the past two years to the White House, sending the list by unclassified email. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that a former CIA agent called the reporting of the names “a counterintelligence disaster.” Lowell also reported that Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he understands that the White House “insisted” on the list coming through unclassified email.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. A disastrous national security development.”
Today, protesters gathered across the country to protest the takeover of the U.S. government by Musk and his cronies, and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) noted on Facebook that the U.S. Senate phone system has been overwhelmed with around 1,600 calls a minute, in contrast to the 40 calls a minute it usually receives. Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) announced he would introduce the ELON MUSK Act—the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act—which would ban federal contracts for Special Government Employees, similar to the bans for members of Congress and other federal employees.
Opposition might well continue to grow, as the bite of the cuts the Trump administration and Musk are making to the federal government is only beginning to be felt at home (the collapse of USAID is already an international crisis). Those cuts are poised to hurt Trump’s own rural voters worse than they hurt Democratic areas. In Virginia, about 400,000 people in rural areas receive healthcare from federally qualified health centers; half of these centers have lost their federal grants and are stopping some services or closing. Trump is currently planning to eliminate the Department of Education; the top six states that receive grants under the department—Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Nevada—all voted for Trump in 2024.
Tonight, Democratic senators, led by Chuck Schumer (NY), Jeff Merkley (OR), Patty Murray (WA), Gary Peters (MI), and Brian Schatz (HI), will hold the Senate floor all night in a filibuster to stop the confirmation of Russell Vought, a key right-wing author of Project 2025, to direct the Office of Management and Budget. “Vought’s proposals to slash federal funding will threaten Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,” the senators said. “Vought will also continue to carry out President Donald Trump’s illegal federal funding cuts, stopping taxpayer dollars from supporting local schools, police departments, community health centers, food pantries, firefighters, and other vital programs.”
I do know of another case, Mr. Kettle, I do. His name is Donald Trump. You may have heard of him.
Now that’s an acronym!
Umm…I know of nine other cases where that happens. The Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.
ETA: This is technically true of all federal judges, including district courts and appeals courts. Judges decide for themselves if they have a conflict of interest that requires recusal. There is oversight for these lower courts, though. If a district court judge should recuse themselves but doesn’t, that can be the basis of an appeal, and the appeals court can overturn the verdict and order a new trial with a new judge, and sanction the judge that failed to recuse themselves. If an appeals court judge should recuse but doesn’t, that can be the basis of an appeal to SCOTUS, who can, again, overturn the appeals court decision and remand the case. With SCOTUS, though, there is no one to appeal to if a Justice fails to recuse themselves.
Kind of a “cultural revolution”, if you will … 
I’m sure it will be a Great Leap Forward. /s
For sure. I just got my little red book in the mail yesterday. (Made you know where, of course.)
Someone needs to sit these people down with “Seeing Like a State” for a little remedial history lesson.
“Oh look…” says @mindysan33, “the math nerd has read a history book… good for him.” 
… yeah yeah … 
I’ve never heard of that book. I think a shorter book suffices to explain what’s going on right now. I’m thinking Animal Farm.
I was thinking The Wizard of Oz. And it’s looking more like Musk is the man behind the curtain pulling strings and levers, not Tramp.
But then there’s Tromp, also yelling at us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…
“Maria Andrade, a longtime immigration lawyer in Idaho, says Ice arrests have been scant in the state so far. ‘We had one that didn’t result in detention,’ she said…Yet the first result for a Google search of ‘ice arrests Idaho’ is a press release from Ice saying 22 people were arrested in an ‘enforcement surge’. The date of publication displayed in the search results is 24 January 2025, but the operation actually happened in July 2010…‘If the objective is to scare people who look up raids in Idaho, that would be a good way to accomplish it,’ Andrade said. ‘That would be a good way to mislead people.’”
On a related front, though it got lost amid the conversation about Musk, ABC News reported that ICE was forced to release a certain number of the immigrants it had arrested because it simply lacks the capacity to hold so many people.
Everyone knows that Trump is a performance artist, yet we see that as somehow a reflection of his personality or character rather than a symptom of a much deeper political syndrome. Political actors use fear when there is a mismatch between their power-mongering and the capacity of the state. As is true of all performance on stage, fear is designed to amplify the voice of the actor, far beyond the confines of the theater. Contrary to what people think, the purpose of fear is not sadism or cruelty. It never has been. It is to compensate for a lack of state capacity.
This is where we, as citizens, come in. The facts are bad enough. The fear factor makes things worse. Your emotions are yours. No one is trying to take your fear away from you. (I say this is as a person who is, personality-wise, extremely anxious.) But when we share our fears publicly, they cease to be our individual emotions. They become part of a system, which, as I said, amplifies the power of Trump.
Meanwhile, people are doing things. They’re calling their representatives, particularly in red states (Republican senators have gone on social media to say that their phone lines are completely jammed up in a way they’ve never seen). They’re organizing their co-workers. They’re demanding that their institutions not cooperate.
We think of Marx as a theorist of capitalism, which he was, but he was also a theorist of action. As I posted yesterday, one of the most important things he discovered, in his own life and in his political work, is that fighting is always better than cowering. All of us feel fear; we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. But fighting in the face of fear is always better. For us and for society.
Certainly could be, even seems likely to me.
For some reason I’m rather reminded of Pol Pot’s “it is always better to go too far than not far enough” approach.
move fast and break things.
I mean these movements are also kind of taught. People act like Zuckerberg and Musk were not literally raised on these movements as learning opportunities. That kind of is taught and if it isn’t formally taught it is certainly informally taught. Just exceptionalism takes care of the rest doesn’t it? “I am smarter than that and things will go better under ME” and so on?
I fully believe they are trying to do it under the belief they are the special ones who will do it the right way and so it won’t be a disaster. They think they debugged it.
We can identify multiple groups, each with their own, largely parallel goals, and they’re working in concert for their own wins, and they will presumably fight to the death with each other over the rubble.
Trump is in it for the grift. I would argue that he himself doesn’t really know what he’s doing or why anymore. He’s demented to the point of confabulation: he doesn’t remember how the sentence he’s speaking started, so whatever comes out of his mouth is true, because he literally doesn’t remember anything else. His family is also in it for the grift, and they know that the moment Trump goes down, each and every one of them is fucked.
Then you’ve got the white nationalists. Like Miller and the ICE fundamentalists. They’ve been reading Camp of the Saints. They’re the ones who want to make English the only official language in the US. They’re the ones who want to expel all the españolhablantes. They’re the ones who want to resegregate because they explicitly want Jim Crow, Apartheid, and antebellum life generally.
Then you’ve got the Christian Dominionists. They want to unify Church and State. Prayers in school, ten commandments in courthouses, atheists and pagans should not be considered citizens. Sodomy (defined as any sex which can’t result in children) is an abomination. Sex is strictly binary and immutable. And, of course, women should be subordinate to men. Quiverfull is where this group and the white nationalists overlap. There’s no Black or Latino branch of Quiverfull, AFAIK. They want Gilead.
Then you’ve got the Technarchy. Incels and “intellectual dark web” posers, who write manifestos in their mother’s basement about how much better everything would work if everyone just accepted that they should have absolute control over everything. Who think that there is no problem which can’t be solved by more technology, and it would all work perfectly if meatsacks weren’t allowed to get in the way.
Then you’ve got the Oligarchy. It’s like the grift, but stepped up. They want to steal everything. It’s not that they want to be paid, it’s that they want to just own everything at a level where “being paid” doesn’t mean anything to them any more. What they want is feudalism: where they own everything, and you the peasant literally have to pay them a tithe just to exist. Where everything is on the subscription model, and every store is a company store.
Then you’ve got the absolutists. They just love the idea of control, for its own sake. They don’t want anything in particular except absolute, unquestioning, obedience. They’re the ones who read 1984 with the other hand down their pants. They want to eliminate disabled people not because they have any particular problem with them, but because disabled people are inconvenient, and because they can. If anything, people caring for the disabled at any level is practising empathy and care, and the absolutists cannot, under any circumstances, allow empathy to be something that people can do. Only obeisance.
Then you’ve got the general fascists. They don’t know what they want, they just know that they want to hurt anyone who isn’t like them. They’re getting it from all of the specific groups, all at once. They think the Technarchy is pretty smart, so they’re happy to let them run stuff. They worship the Oligarchs as being better than them because they’re so rich, and are happy to be serfs, on the understanding that they’ll be important, valued serfs. They think that Family Values are pretty important, and even better if that means they get a wife who isn’t allowed to leave them or say “no”. They hate the mere existence of other languages and other cultures, and think that everyone with any education or intelligence is secretly laughing at them, just like those people who go to pagan temples instead of church, just like those people who speak Spanish (any language they don’t recognise is Spanish), just like women.
