Trumpocracy
So . . . we have a president elect who is completely unqualified, overwhelmed, surrounded by racists and conspiracy theorists, and openly supported by Neo Nazis and the KKK. After 7 days as president elect, he has yet to address the American People except for his acceptance speech and his bizarre appearance on 60 Minutes.
According to Rachel Maddow last night, the Trump team has not yet reached out to the DOJ, the intelligence community, Homeland Security or any other government entity we know about and they are not answering calls from people in the government who are anxious to begin working on the transition.
He has announced the appointment of Reince Priebus as WH chief of staff and Steven Bannon as chief White House strategist and senior counselor. Neither of these men has any experience in government. Priebus does know GOP leaders, of course; but he has little apparent knowlege about how the White House and the Federal government work. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is so ignorant of government that on Thursday he actually asked White House staffers how many of them would be staying on after Obama leaves!
Rudy Giuliani is the top choice to be Secretary of State. The second choice is John Bolton. One positive note: Ben Carson has said he doesn’t want a role in the Trump administration. He was being mention as Secretary of Education! So now many they’ll just go ahead and eliminate that department as Trump as threatened.
President Obama gave a press conference yesterday in which he provided veiled warnings about what may happen, announced that he will be visiting a number of foreign countries to try to reassure them, and that he will be helping Trump get ready for a job he will never be ready for.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic: Obama Is Warning America About Trump’s Presidency. Are You Listening?
President Barack Obama’s remarks about Donald Trump in his Monday press conference contained some of the most ominous words I’ve heard since news networks began calling the election for Trump early last Wednesday morning….
In a tense environment in which reporters, government workers, world leaders, and anxious citizens and immigrants understandably are scrutinizing every Donald Trump tweet and utterance and leak, Obama’s closing thoughts on the presidency and his successor will inevitably be given short shrift. But the things he says about the transition contain critical information about its progress and his confidence that, on the other side of it, things will run fairly smoothly.
His Monday comments suggests he has very little confidence that they will.
On the subtext of Obama’s remarks:
On the surface, his comments were reassuring. He was chipper. He did not doomsay. He searched for the generous and hopeful things to say about Trump and Trump’s designs on the presidency. But the sum total of his remarks, on close reading, were frightening—a stage-setting, at the very least, for an administration that Obama expects will be hobbled by incompetence and likely to fail.
Obama kept returning to three basic themes: that Trump will be given every opportunity to succeed, thanks to the tutelage Obama and his team will be providing, and the fact Trump won’t be inheriting massive crises—which should give him the kind of running room Obama never enjoyed; but that the work of a presidency is ceaseless, and much of it highly detail-oriented; and finally that Trump’s grasp of what he’s been elected to do is at best remedial.
Obama may be subtly trying to communicate to the Trump transition team that they need to make massive strides, and quickly, or they will be, in Obama’s words, “swamped.” But his expectation that Trump and his entourage will get their act together is clearly very low.
Please go read the rest.
Steve Bannon
On November 10 Elliot Cohen, a conservative, hawkish foreign policy guy who worked for awhile under Condoleeza Rice and who helped organize other national security experts to oppose Trump, wrote this at The American Interest: To An Anxious Friend…
First, the buffers and restraints built into our system—Congress, the courts, the press, bureaucratic inertia, federalism, and certain norms—are really quite strong. Republican politicians know that with a better candidate they would not have eked out a bare tie in the popular vote, but would have crushed Clinton and added to their Senate majority rather than reduced it. They are not beholden to Trump and do not feel that they should be. He will not be able to rule as a dictator. And in truth, Democratic fears that he may are salutary. So many of them dismissed Republican complaints about a politicized Internal Revenue Service—my guess is that they are rediscovering a healthy respect for older values of rigid political neutrality, as well as the larger system of checks and balances.
Second, Trump may be better than we think. He does not have strong principles about much, which means he can shift. He is clearly willing to delegate legislation to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. And even abroad, his instincts incline him to increase U.S. strength—and to push back even against Russia if, as will surely happen, Putin double-crosses him. My guess is that sequester gets rolled back, as do lots of stupid regulations, and experiments in nudging and nagging Americans to behave the way progressives think they should.
Third, part of the magic of America is its ability to regenerate itself. Both parties produced rotten outcomes at the presidential level; both deceived themselves about the actual concerns of the American people; both desperately need new generations of leaders. Those will emerge. What one can hope for as well is a sobering realization about the extent to which both have played dangerous games—with identity politics, with falsehoods, with cultural contempt, and above all, with the transformation of politics into a matter of unthinking tribalism.
Tough times ahead, no doubt. But I think about my grandparents, who fled pogroms, arrived here penniless, and experienced World War I and the influenza pandemic, as well as ethnic and religious discrimination of a kind now unthinkable. My parents lived through the Depression and World War II—and then the social upheavals of the 1960s.
Then he apparently reached out to the Trump people. Here’s what he tweeted about that today.
Not very reassuring.
A couple more stories that caught my attention:
NBC News: Trump Transition Shake-Up Part of ‘Stalinesque Purge’ of Christie Loyalists.
The Donald Trump transition, already off to slow start, bogged down further Tuesday with the abrupt resignation of former Congressman Mike Rogers, who had been coordinating its national security efforts.
Two sources close to Rogers said he had been the victim of what one called a “Stalinesque purge,” from the transition of people close to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who left Friday. It was unclear which other aides close to Christie had also been forced out….
He [Rogers] and his top aide had been working for months, preparing the groundwork for transition. Two sources close to the situation described an atmosphere of sniping and backbiting as Trump loyalists position themselves for key jobs….
Rogers’ departure follows Christie’s demotion from head of the team to a vice-chair, with Vice President-elect Mike Pence taking over for him last week.
The purge indicates the emphasis on loyalty — and significant influence of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, husband of Ivanka — that characterized Trump’s campaign will carry over into his White House.
Multiple sources indicated that Christie was demoted because he wasn’t seen as sufficiently loyal to Trump, failing to vocally defend him at key moments on the campaign trail.
Rogers had been mentioned as a candidate for CIA director, but now he’s out.
USA Today Exclusive: Fox anchor Megyn Kelly describes scary, bullying ‘Year of Trump.’
In her new memoir, Settle for More, Kelly describes how an unexpectedly anxious Trump complained to Fox News executives last year about what she’d do as a moderator of the debate. The questions Kelly and her colleagues planned to ask the candidates were secret. She wrote that days before the debate, Trump called Fox “in an attempt to rein me in. … He said he had ‘heard’ that my first question was a very pointed question directed at him.” Kelly’s first question was in fact for Trump and about his treatment and descriptions of women. She wondered, she wrote, “How could he know that?”
In an exclusive interview Monday with USA TODAY — one in which she discussed what she called her “Year of Trump” and her stand against former Fox News chief Roger Ailes — Kelly said she did not believe her question leaked to Trump beforehand. “I don’t think he had any idea,” she said. “What I think he was worried about was his divorce from Ivana Trump. … He was afraid I was going to bring that up.”
Much more about Kelly’s dealings with Trump and his pal Roger Ailes at the link.
More reads, links only:
NYT: Donald Trump’s Far-Flung Holdings Raise Potential for Conflicts of Interest.
Columbia Journalism Review: Eight steps reporters should take before Trump assumes office, by Dana Priest
WaPo: Paul Ryan’s plan to phase out Medicare is just what Democrats need, by Paul Waldman
LA Times: Paul Ryan is determined to gut Medicare. This time he might succeed, by Michael Hiltzik
Daily Beast: Steve Bannon’s Dream: A Worldwide Ultra-Right, by Christopher Dickey
WaPo: Hate crimes against Muslims hit highest mark since 2001.
TPM: Jeff Sessions, Now Up For AG, Once Rejected From Judgeship For Racist Remarks.
That’s all I have. I’m still really struggling with my emotions, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take before I find my center again. This situation has triggered my deepest childhood fears and traumas. I just hope it isn’t going to be as disastrous as I expect.
Courage, Sky Dancers!
Well, I’m not sure what to say … still …The first bad news is that Steven Bannon is the new Karl Rove. There will be a white nationalist who hates women in charge of policy strategy. This is from a petition at SPLC. Please consider signing it.
Bannon presided over a news empire where he, according to former staffers, ”aggressively pushed stories against immigrants, and supported linking minorities to terrorism and crime.”
“We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon said in July, using a term that is really just a rebranding of traditional white nationalism.
Under Bannon, Breitbart published a call to “hoist [the Confederate flag] high and fly it with pride” only two weeks after the Charleston massacre when the country was still reeling from the horrors of the murders.
Under Bannon, Breitbart published an extremist anti-Muslim tract where the author wrote that “rape culture” is “integral” to Islam.
Worse perhaps, Bannon personally insinuated that African Americans are “naturally aggressive and violent.”
The second bit is that Lamar White, Jr. is likely right that media theorist Neil Postman who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business was astoundingly prescient. Has America “amused itself to death”? The media played right into proving Postman’s hypothesis imho.
From the moment he announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015, bizarrely gliding down the escalator of his eponymous tower, America was hooked.
It didn’t matter how absurd he behaved or who he insulted; that was part of the fun, and instead of marginalizing him, it became a justification for the media to focus on him even more. He became must-see TV, not because he said anything substantive or even remotely realistic about domestic or foreign policy. In fact, he made it repeatedly clear that he had very little idea what he was talking about. According to non-partisan fact-checking organizations, more than 70% of what he said on the campaign trail was either mostly false or completely false. He lied far more often than he told the truth.
No, he became must-see TV, because like any good salesman and showman, Donald Trump understood his audience. He spoke in vague platitudes and pitched a slogan- “Make America Great Again”- that could fill in for an answer on any question. He surrounded himself with media professionals. His son-in-law owns The New York Observer, a paper that was more than happy to publish thinly-sourced gossip about his opponent as if it was gospel truth. He counted Sean Hannity, the conservative talk show radio host and FOX News celebrity, as a top adviser, along with Roger Ailes, the Republican political operative who built FOX News into a media empire before being forced to resign amid allegations of sexual harassment. And he hired Steve Bannon, the anti-Semitic editor of the popular conservative news website Breitbart, as his campaign’s chief executive.
In the immediate aftermath of his stunning victory, which shocked even Trump himself and which practically no one had predicted, there was a tendency to believe that Trump’s message of “economic populism” was the critical key to his success. He flipped enough working-class white voters in the Rust Belt because his message resonated with them.
This, I’m afraid, gives far too much credit to what truly motivated those voters, because Trump, despite all of his bluster about renegotiating trade deals and being the only person on the planet that could solve America’s problems, never had a serious plan to help the working class. His message was not about “economic populism;” it was about nativist resentment. It was not about inspiring “the forgotten man and woman,” as he suggested shortly after winning the presidency; it was about stoking their anger: Mexicans are illegally depriving you of a job; the Chinese are ripping us off; Muslims are terrorizing us; African-Americans are disrespecting “law and order” by protesting against police brutality; a global cabal of financiers are secretly conspiring to plunder our wealth (you shouldn’t need a history degree to figure out what that was about).
These Rust Belt voters, who determined the election despite the fact that Hillary Clinton is expected to win nationwide by at least 2 million votes, weren’t parsing through detailed policy papers from both candidates; they weren’t reading the objective economic analysis about the ways in which Clinton’s plans would add 10 million jobs to the workforce while Trump’s would result in a loss of 3 million jobs.
Please read the entire essay. You’ll be glad did.
Amanda Marcotte–writing for Salon–says “Yes, the white male anger that fueled Trump’s victory was real — but it isn’t valid.”
The anger that Donald Trump voters feel is very real. You don’t fling a proto-fascist pussy-grabbing monstrosity into the White House unless you really want to convey that fuck-you sentiment.
Because this anger is so real and so palpable, there’s been an unfortunate tendency in much of the media to assume that this anger must also be valid. The entire election cycle was a clusterfuck of articles demanding empathy for Trump voters, insisting that their rage must have some rational roots — perhaps economic insecurity?
The persistence of the “economic insecurity” angle in the face of overwhelming evidence against it was a testament to the power of hope over reason. If economic insecurity drives this rage, then something can be done about it. But if the rage is driven by less savory factors — unrepentant sexism and racism — then there is no way to mollify it without throwing women and people of color under the bus. It is also not for nothing that most “economic insecurity” theorists were themselves white men, perhaps eager for a narrative that makes people who look like them seem a little more sympathetic.
But wishing doesn’t make something true, or we’d be chatting about a President-elect Hillary Clinton today.
No doubt Trump supporters are people who felt they’ve lost something. But what they’ve lost is something that wasn’t rightly theirs to begin with: Unearned privilege. The Trump revolution was driven by white men who are watching women and people of color making gains that put them closer to equality. They are rebelling at the erosion of the sense that white men are better and more important than everyone else, simply because they exist.
Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian writes: “Don’t call Clinton a weak candidate: it took decades of scheming to beat her.”
Sometimes I think I have never seen anything as strong as Hillary Clinton. That doesn’t mean that I like and admire everything about her. I’m not here to argue about who she is, just to note what she did. I watched her plow through opposition and attacks the like of which no other candidate has ever faced and still win the popular vote. To defeat her it took an unholy cabal far beyond what Barack Obama faced when he was the campaign of change, swimming with the tide of disgust about the Bush administration. As the New York Times reported, “By the time all the ballots are counted, she seems likely to be ahead by more than 2m votes and more than 1.5 percentage points. She will have won by a wider percentage margin than not only Al Gore in 2000 but also Richard Nixon in 1968 and John F Kennedy in 1960.”
You can flip that and see that Trump was such a weak candidate it took decades of scheming and an extraordinary international roster of powerful players to lay the groundwork that made his election possible. Defeating Clinton in the electoral college took the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act by Republican appointees to the supreme court. It took vast Republican voter suppression laws and tactics set in place over many years. It took voter intimidation at many polling places. It took the long Republican campaign to blow up the boring bureaucratic irregularity of Clinton’s use of a private email server into a scandal that the media obediently picked up and reheated.
Kurt Eichenwald continues to be a voice worthy hearing. His Newsweek headline reads: “THE MYTHS DEMOCRATS SWALLOWED THAT COST THEM THE PRESIDENTIAL 
ELECTION.”
A certain kind of liberal makes me sick. These people traffic in false equivalencies, always pretending that both nominees are the same, justifying their apathy and not voting or preening about their narcissistic purity as they cast their ballot for a person they know cannot win. I have no problem with anyone who voted for Trump, because they wanted a Trump presidency. I have an enormous problem with anyone who voted for Trump or Stein or Johnson—or who didn’t vote at all—and who now expresses horror about the outcome of this election. If you don’t like the consequences of your own actions, shut the hell up.
So, I could post dozens of links about stuff here but I think it’s best you share what resonates with you today. Meanwhile, just let a little bit of Maya’s wisdom wash all over you!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
I’m feeling even worse this morning than I did yesterday. I woke up in fear, my heart pounding. I’ve been reading a lot this morning, but I’m not ready to do a real post. I just can’t. I hope you guys can fill in for me a bit for now. I’ll try my best to write something later today. I can’t guarantee anything though.
I’m not giving up, but I’m going through an emotional reaction that could take some time. I’ve said before that it feels like a death in the family. It’s similar to how I felt when my father died, but in some ways it’s worse. My dad lived a long and productive life. His time came and he went quickly. This could mean the death of democracy, the death of everything we hold dear, everything that made the U.S. a place of hope, despite its many serious flaws.
I wish all of you the best today. I love you all and care about you. I’ll definitely be back later, but right now I need to take care of myself as best I can.
HE TELLS HER | WENDY COPE
He tells her that the Earth is flat—
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.
The planet goes on being round.
This is an open thread.
Many of us have family who fought against fascism and white nationalism back in the day. I’m sure none of them thought it possible for a man brandishing these viewpoints and values to be headed to the White House. I’m not sure what the Greatest Generation would say to us about undoing all their sacrifice and by putting a man as President whose idea of sacrifice is taking his Daddy’s money and building stuff but I’m sure it wouldn’t be particularly flattering. We’re about to see the Constitution challenged in way that hasn’t occurred since the Civil War. Prepare for a war in the courts.
This is my daddy who I sorely miss. He’s been gone just over two years now. He was a Vet of WW2. He served in the US Army Air Corps and once his squadron was led by Captain Jimmy Stewart. Imagine hearing that voice over your com! Remember all those movies and bond drives to make sure that Europe was free from Fascism and that we would never see them here?
Daddy was a bombardier who flew out of Ipswich in England. He bombed targets between Belgium and Germany so Allied forces could advance into Berlin. He was on many missions where few planes returned to England. He was my hero on many levels.
My father fought fascism. I’m glad in some way that he didn’t live to see a Fascist in the White House. He knew first hand the cost of white nationalism.
It costs dearly. This Veteran’s Day I keep a special thought for the Khans. I know Memorial Day is for Gold star families but it’s still the day to thank all our Vets. I certainly hope we can hold on to our Constitution and to our laws out of respect for their sacrifices.
I have a list of attacks on minorities of all sorts for you. In the last three day, we have numerous reports of children crying and afraid to go to school. We’ve had reports of verbal assaults and attacks on Muslims, African Americans, Jewish people, women, and Hispanics. The North Carolina KKK will be holding a parade to celebrate the election of their glorious leader to President. Damascus is happy. The Russians are ebullient. The Chinese are pleased. The OIC countries are threatening to remove their embassies from this country should Trump follow through with his promise to move the US Embassy to Israel into Jerusalem.
Multiple TRIGGER WARNINGS:
Ohio: Racist graffiti, swastikas mar Clintonville in night
Women Rush To Get Long-Acting Birth Control After Trump Wins
Minnesota: Secret Service probing van’s violent, vulgar message aimed at Clinton on I-94
Maple Grove School Investigating Racist, Pro-Trump Graffiti
North Carolina: Downtown Durham graffiti takes aim at black voters
A rash of racist attacks have broken out in the US after Donald Trump’s victory
It is not an external enemy that has done this.
Pence has promised Dobson that the first rights to be removed will be those of GLBT. We’ve already had physical attacks and verbal abuse of gays over the last 3 days.
During an interview with James Dobson, host of the wildly homophobic Focus on the Family, Mike Pence assured his interviewer and his supporters that any progress made toward protecting LGBTQ rights under President Obama will be swiftly undone under President Trump. Issue by issue, he asserted over and over again a plan to marginalize and invalidate an entire group of citizens whom he is about to lead as vice-president.
Remember President Obama issuing orders to protect transgender citizens from being exposed to transphobia, hatred, and violence in public restrooms inside schools and federal buildings? Those protections are over.
I’ve got many more examples, but I think you can see that this is turning ugly.
Has any other election brought us to a situation where children are afraid to go to their schools and are crying about it?
Here is an article by Bill Moyers I thought I would share. It’s titled: Farewell, America. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently.
We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.
If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.
This country has survived a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more or less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.
The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.
Democracy can’t cope with extremism.
I wish I could say that things will get easier or better from here on out. That maybe the Fascist in waiting will rise to the occasion. 
Unfortunately, I’ve seen the list of cabinet suggestions. It’s Orwellian. They’re some of the biggest fattest cats of all the Washington insiders. There’s also plenty of crazy to go around. I’m trying to put this information to you in links so you can see it if you want. I’m sticking to the broader theme of why I am very despondent and very full of fear. I have the right skin costume albeit the wrong reproductive parts. There are neighbors, friends, colleagues and family that will be very much threatened.
The callous notes that bother me the most are the ones that tell me that maybe this all will work it. It reminds me of the people that kept saying that awful campaign was going to look more presidential. Not.GOING.to.HAPPEN.
I’ve turned off the TV. I may watch a few escape programs but I cannot under any circumstances deal with TV News. I have, however, found out that pool reporters are being denied access all over the place. Amazon stock has taken a hit on the market because Jeff Bezos own WaPo and President elect Trump has threatened revenge.
There are all kinds of protests out there still. There are all kinds of petitions. The problem is that none of it will work. Only the type of organization and movement led by Dr. King with folks of total discipline and manner and in it for the long run are going to make a difference. Now is the time to organize. Now is the time to steel the nerves of Democratic Congress Critters. Now is the time to stop any Vichy-style collaborators. After all, the Democrats received none for 8 long years.
I agree with Joseph Cannon. It is time to mount The White Rose Society for our country.
I can only heal right now.
Take care and I love you all.
Discuss whatever among st yourselves.
Leonard Cohen has passed away at age 82. His voice will be missed. His message was always sublime.
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