Lazy Caturday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

By Katrina Pallon

I don’t think I’ve fully come to terms with the fact that we are once again faced with Donald Trump as “president.” Of course we really don’t know what is going to happen to our country or to us as its citizens, but we know it’s going to be bad. 

The first Trump term was horrific, and that was when he believed he needed to listen to his advisers. He appointed somewhat competent people to top positions in his administration, and he occasionally listened to them. There were so-called “adults in the room” who were able to partially control his worst impulses, or sometimes just work around his demands.

This time will be different. He is nominating people who are loyal to him personally but have no expertise in the positions they have been chosen for. They have been picked to destroy the bureaucracies they will control.

Trump knows that some of these people could be rejected by the Senate, so he is demanding the power to use “recess appointments.” He wants the Senate and the House to be in recess after his inauguration so that he can install these loyal incompetents without involving the Senate’s “advise and consent” role. He also plans to grant security clearances to his chosen sycophants without FBI background checks. He means to destroy the independence of the Department of Justice, including the CIA and FBI. He also plans to take full control of the military and enforce loyalty to him, and not to the Constitution. 

Thanks to the right wing Supreme Court, he may be able to accomplish these things. They have granted him immunity for anything he does in his role president, including crimes.

During his first term, Trump often praised foreign dictators. He expressed admiration for China’s Xi Jinping’s takeover in China, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He praised Xi for making himself president for life. He admires Erdoğan for ending democracy in his country and taking power for the long term. He repeatedly said he would like “my people” to behave obediently like Kim John Un’s audiences–by mindlessly applauding everything he says or does. And of course everyone knows that Trump admires and fears Russia’s Vladimir Putin. We now know that Trump even praised Adolf Hitler during his time in the White House. We have a very good idea of what Trump hopes to do to this country.

Why should we expect that Trump will now behave like any other U.S. president? Why should we be so sure that there will be meaningful elections in 2026 and 2028? The leaders that Trump has praised have made sure that any elections held in their countries are–to use Trump’s term–rigged? Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and Orban are still in control of their countries. North Korea, of course, is a family dictatorship. Perhaps Trump hopes to pass on control of the U.S. to one of his children. We need to be aware of what he may be planning–not imagine that we live in the previous U.S. in which laws and norms protected us from a  wannabe dictator.

After the announcement that Trump would forgo background checks on his appointees, investigative journalist Dave Troy wrote (on Twitter, I won’t link to it)

Let me be clear: the country is gone. You may still think you have one, but it’s like phantom limb syndrome. Don’t look yet. It’s too painful. But when you’re ready, gaze upon it. For all its volume and noise and mass… it is but an illusion. What comes next is hell, and chaos.

We had a chance. But today, I think, is the day we lost it. The day the free world fell. We will go through motions and react and laugh, or not laugh, we will be serious and joking and call each other horrible things. But this was the day when the last bulwark fell.

By Lucy Almey Bird

I have to agree with him. Trump fantasizes about being president for life like Putin, Xi, and Orban. We are in serious danger of becoming another Hungary.

I hope I’m overreacting. Maybe PTSD is making me more fearful than I need to be. I know my sleep has been even more disturbed than usual lately. But I’d rather face what Trump is really up to than act like the Democrats, who seem to just assume that politics as usual will be restored after free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028.

I am an optimist at heart, and I still have hope for the future. I hope that everything I’ve written above is wrong. But I’ll have to see it happen in order to truly believe it. 

Here are some reads to check out today:

Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about the term Kakistocracy. This article by Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini in The Atlantic explores the idea: American Kakistocracy. Italy knows a thing or two about what the United States faces—but there are key differences between the two countries’ experiences.

Why is a regular guy attracted to a billionaire candidate? It’s simple: Because the candidate can play to people’s fantasies. The man knows his television, loves girls, hates rules, knows how to make a deal, tells jokes, uses bad language, and is convivial to a fault. He is loud, vain, cheeky. He has a troubled relationship with his age and his hair. He has managed to survive embarrassment, marital misadventures, legal troubles, political about-faces. He’s entangled in conflicts of interest, but he couldn’t care less. His party? A monument to himself.

He thinks God is his publicist, and twists religion to suit his own ends. He may not be like us, but he makes sure there’s something about him that different people can relate to personally. He is, above all, a man of enormous intuition. He is aware of this gift and uses it ruthlessly. He knows how to read human beings, their desires and their weaknesses. He doesn’t tell you what to do; he forgives you, period.

Here in Italy, he loomed over our politics—and our lives—for 30 years. He created his own party in 1994 (Forza Italia, a sort of Make Italy Great Again), and a few months later, he became Italy’s prime minister for the first time. He didn’t last long, but he climbed back into government in 2001, and then again in 2008. Three years later, he resigned amid sex scandals and crumbling public finances, but he managed to remain a power broker until he died last year.

Silvio Berlusconi, like Donald Trump, was a right-wing leader capable of attracting the most disappointed and least informed voters, who historically had chosen the left. He chased them, understood them, pampered them, spoiled them with television and soccer. He introduced the insidious dictatorship of sympathy.

By Steve Danielson

But Silvio Berlusconi is not Donald Trump.

Berlusconi respected alliances and was loyal to his international partners. He loved both Europe and America. He believed in free trade. And he accepted defeat. His appointments were at times bizarre but seldom outrageous. He tried hard to please everybody and to portray himself as a reliable, good-hearted man. Trump, as we know, doesn’t even try.

Berlusconi may have invented a format, but Trump adopted and twisted it. Trump’s victory on November 5 is clear and instructive, and it gives the whole world a signal as to where America is headed.

he scent of winners is irresistible for some people. The desire to cheer Trump’s victory clouds their view. They don’t see, or perhaps don’t take seriously, the danger signs. Reliability and coherence, until recently a must for a political leader, have taken a back seat. Showing oneself as virtuous risks being counterproductive: It could alienate voters, who would feel belittled.

American journalism—what is left of it, anyway—meticulously chronicled Trump’s deceitfulness. It made no difference, though. On the contrary, it seems to have helped him. Trump’s deputy, J. D. Vance, explained calmly in an interview that misleading people—maybe even lying to them—is sometimes necessary to overcome the hostility of the media.

Here’s a gift link if you’d like to read the rest at The Atlantic.

Adam Jentelson at The New York Times: When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?

When Donald Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, critics scoffed that there was no way he could win New York State. Yet as a strategic matter, asking the question “What would it take for a Republican to win New York?” leads to the answer, “It would take overperforming with Black, Hispanic and working-class voters.”

Mr. Trump didn’t win New York, of course, but his gains with nonwhite voters helped him sweep all seven battleground states.

Unlike Democrats, Mr. Trump engaged in what I call supermajority thinking: envisioning what it would take to achieve an electoral realignment and working from there.

Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment. We have been conditioned to think of our era of polarization as a stable arrangement of rough parity between the parties that will last indefinitely, but history teaches us that such periods usually give way to electoral realignments. Last week, Mr. Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like. Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.

That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.

Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.

More at the NYT link.

Reid J. Epstein and Lisa Lerer at The New York Times: Democrats Draw Up an Entirely New Anti-Trump Battle Plan.

Locked out of power next year, Democrats are hatching plans to oppose President-elect Donald J. Trump that look nothing like the liberal “resistance” of 2017.

Gone are the pink knit caps and homemade signs from the huge protest that convulsed blue America that year, as exhausted liberals seem more inclined to tune out Mr. Trump than fight.

By Lucy Olivieri

Washington is far different, too. The Republicans who stymied some of Mr. Trump’s first-term agenda are now dead, retired or Democrats. And the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by the former president, has proved how far it will go in bending to his will.

As they face this tough political landscape, Democratic officials, activists and ambitious politicians are seeking to build their second wave of opposition to Mr. Trump from the places that they still control: deep-blue states.

Democrats envision flexing their power in these states to partly block the Trump administration’s policies — for example, by refusing to enforce immigration laws — and to push forward their vision of governance by passing state laws enshrining abortion rights, funding paid leave and putting in place a laundry list of other party priorities.

Some of the planning in blue states began in 2023 as a potential backstop if Mr. Trump won, according to multiple Democrats involved in different efforts. The preparations were largely kept quiet to avoid projecting public doubts about Democrats’ ability to win the election.

“States in our system have a lot of power — we’re entrusted with protecting people, and we’re going to do it,” said Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, who said his office had been preparing for Mr. Trump’s potential return to power for more than a year. “They can expect that we’re going to show up every single time when they try to run over the American people.”

The Democratic effort will rely on the work of hundreds of lawyers, who are being recruited to combat Trump administration policies on a range of Democratic priorities. Already, advocacy groups have begun workshopping cases and recruiting potential plaintiffs to challenge expected regulations, laws and administrative actions starting on Day 1.

More at the link.

NBC News: John Fetterman says Democrats need to stop ‘freaking out’ over everything Trump does.

In the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, Sen. John Fetterman did something different than other Democrats.

He went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, a show Democrats had been urging Vice President Kamala Harris to do — and the kind of appearance Democrats feel their candidates need to get more comfortable making in the current media environment.

By Katrina Pallon

But Fetterman, who built a blunt, says-what-he-means brand, said Democratic setbacks in 2024 had more to do with unpopular positions progressives promoted than any lack of communication from the party’s center-left establishment.

“It’s not even what you might say as a candidate,” Fetterman said in an interview, adding “all of the very hard-left, kind of ‘woke’ things” Republicans used in advertising this year “are unloaded on the backs of all of us in purple states, and we’re paying for all of the things that our colleagues might say in these hard blue kinds of districts.”

That’s part of Fetterman’s broader post-election message for his party. Moving forward, he says, Democrats can’t get wrapped up in “freaking out” over every controversial move Trump makes, adding that has proven to be a losing formula for the party and its brand. He was speaking after Trump selected former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., for attorney general and just before he tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

“I’ve said this before, it’s like, clutch those pearls harder and scold louder — that’s not going to win,” Fetterman, D-Pa., said. “And that’s been demonstrated in this cycle.”

In the interview, Fetterman detailed his thoughts on this month’s election, how he’s readying for his party’s life in the wilderness and whether he has interest in seeking the presidency in 2028. 

Read the interview at the NBC link.

Anna Gifty at Public Notice: Kamala Harris’s hidden barrier. Her rise and fall illustrates the Glass Cliff.

Black women have long had to navigate being twice as good to get half the amount of credit. Kamala Harris’s presidential run was evidence of this. 

Despite the stark difference in the tenor of each candidate’s campaign and the the quality of their policy proposals, many still questioned whether they could trust Harris’s leadership and opted for her opponent. Ultimately, an overwhelming majority of white voters voted Republican. 

National exit polls showed that for white voters, their choice was largely a product educational attainment. Fifty-seven percent of college-educated white women voted for Harris, while 63 percent of non-college white women voted for Donald Trump. For white men, regardless of educational level, a majority voted for Trump. Contrast that with the 77 percent of Black men and 91 percent of Black women who voted for Kamala Harris. 

The majority of the Black electorate, regardless of educational level, voted for Harris. But it wasn’t enough. The outcome reminded me of the Glass Cliff and the double standards for Black leaders that come along with it.  

In my own experience as a Black woman studying economics and policy at Harvard, I’ve seen how leadership roles for women of color, especially Black women, come with a unique set of risks and pressures, especially when taken on during challenging times.

For instance, early this year, Claudine Gay, the former president of my university, resigned after just six months on the job amid a concerted effort by right-wing culture-warriors to force her out. Gay was more than qualified for her job, but she wasn’t given the benefit of the doubt when she was accused of plagiarism and her tenure as the first Black person to lead Harvard ended up being the shortest in history.

By Marcella Cooper

The Glass Cliff refers to situations where women from marginalized groups are promoted into leadership during times of crisis and/or when the risk of failure is high. For example, back in 2021, Yogananda Pittman became the first Black person and first woman to lead the Capitol Police as it faced criticism for its handling of January 6. Minorities and women getting promotions often face impossible circumstances. And if they succeed, the person who gave them the opportunity gets credit.

When Biden dropped out of the race in July, he left Kamala Harris with a challenge that no modern presidential candidate has faced. Biden was losing in the polls, Democrats were divided over his presidency and refusal to get out of the race earlier, and Harris had to compete against a man who not only had been running for president for years, but is also a seasoned purveyor of racism and sexism.

While pundits have busied themselves over the past 10 days nitpicking Harris’s campaign, one thing is abundantly clear: She was held to the highest standards of leadership while Trump was held to no standard at all. Where Harris was pressed to present concrete, detailed policy stances, Trump skated by with crude bigotry and mere “concepts of plans”. 

Read more at Public Notice.

The New Republic: Trump Picks Man Who Helped Him Get Away With Crimes to Run the Courts.

Donald Trump has nominated his attorney D. John Sauer, whom you may remember as the lawyer who argued that the president should be able to kill his political rivals with impunity, to be the country’s next solicitor general.

Earlier this year, Sauer helped Trump win his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court, which undermined other federal legal battles against Trump, like the time he tried to overturn the government after losing the 2020 election. Now Sauer will oversee all federal lawsuits.

In a statement Thursday, Trump lauded Sauer as the “lead counsel representing me in the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, winning a Historic Victory on Presidential Immunity, which was key to defeating the unConstitutional campaign of Lawfare against me and the entire MAGA movement.”

While representing Trump, Sauer argued that if the president ordered an assassination on his political enemies, he could not be indicted unless he had first been impeached.

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor drilled him about immunity in the case of assassinating political rivals, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical but we can see that would well be an official act.” When she asked if the same rule existed if the president executed people for “personal gain,” Sauer said that immunity still stood.

One more, from Politico: Biden’s White House stares down a Trump takeover.

The White House is finalizing plans to spend Joe Biden’s last months in office putting the finishing touches on his legacy — even as it welcomes a successor determined to tear it all down.

By Marcella Cooper

Senior Biden aides mapping out the remaining 65 days are prioritizing efforts to cement key pillars of the president’s agenda by accelerating manufacturing and infrastructure investments. They’re placing fresh emphasis on the major health and energy policies most at risk of repeal, while coordinating a Senate sprint to fill judicial vacancies. And in a move that could mark the last gasp of tangible American support for Ukraine, officials are rushing out $6 billion of remaining aid and preparing a final round of sanctions against Russia.

New measures targeting the nation’s lucrative energy industry are among the sanctions under consideration, a White House official granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations said, now that the administration is freed from pre-election anxieties over the potential impact on domestic gas prices.

The final flurry of work has provided a renewed sense of purpose within a White House unmoored by Donald Trump’s pending return to power, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen administration officials and outside advisers. Yet there’s also open acknowledgment that for all the activity, little they do in the next two months may matter after Inauguration Day.

Trump is poised to take a sledgehammer to much of what the administration leaves behind — and no amount of tending to Biden’s own reputation can stop it.

“The bottom line,” said Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy expert close to senior Biden officials, “is there just isn’t anything Biden can do today that isn’t reversible in 10 weeks.”