Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. I was 15 years old, a junior in high school. I still see that day as a defining event in my life. It was my first real experience of death, and I recall how difficult it was for me to comprehend and accept that our brilliant and charismatic president was really gone forever. It was my first lesson in how quickly dramatic events can change our understanding of the world.
Everything was different after that. If Kennedy had lived, he very likely would have won a second term, and perhaps the course of the Vietnam War could have been different. Perhaps Richard Nixon would not have made his comeback and been elected president in 1968. We can’t know what would have happened, but I think that if Kennedy could have completed a second term, our history would have been very different.
Of course Lyndon Johnson did complete many of Kennedy’s projects like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965. Kennedy’s tragic death and Johnson’s legislative experience likely helped these laws get passed. But there was something about Jack Kennedy that inspired and energized the country, and that energy was lost after his death–especially after Johnson’s failure in Vietnam and his stubbor refusal to change course.
It’s the weekend and I need a break from the current madness in politics, so I’m going to share a few reads about that long ago day in 1963.
Heather Cox Richardson at Letters from an American: November 22, 2024.
It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were visiting Texas. They were there, in the home state of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the Democratic Party. The white supremacists who made up the base of the party’s southern wing loathed the Kennedy administration’s support for Black rights.
That base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had backed the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in fall 1962 saying that army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss.
When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights.
So the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there and became increasingly violent. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!” The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals. They killed two men and wounded many others.
By Susan Herbert (after The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer)
The riot ended when the president sent 20,000 troops to the campus. On October 1, Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights, and white supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that their stance proved that the Kennedys were communists. Using a strong federal government to regulate business would prevent a man from making all the money he might otherwise; protecting civil rights would take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis warned that “the Castro Brothers”—equating the Kennedys with communist revolutionaries in Cuba—had gone to Ole Miss.
That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend some fences in the state Democratic Party.
How the day began:
On the morning of November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife that they were “heading into nut country today.”
But the motorcade through Dallas started out in a party atmosphere. At the head of the procession, the president and first lady waved from their car at the streets “lined with people—lots and lots of people—the children all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows,” Lady Bird remembered. “There had been such a gala air,” she said, that when she heard three shots, “I thought it must be firecrackers or some sort of celebration.”
The Secret Service agents had no such moment of confusion. The cars sped forward, “terrifically fast—faster and faster,” according to Lady Bird, until they arrived at a hospital, which made Mrs. Johnson realize what had happened. “As we ground to a halt” and Secret Service agents began to pull them out of the cars, Lady Bird wrote, “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat…Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”
As they waited for news of the president, LBJ asked Lady Bird to go find Mrs. Kennedy. Lady Bird recalled that Secret Service agents “began to lead me up one corridor, back stairs, and down another. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall…outside the operating room. You always think of her—or someone like her—as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.”
After trying to comfort Mrs. Kennedy, Lady Bird went back to the room where her husband was. It was there that Kennedy’s special assistant told them, “The President is dead,” just before journalist Malcolm Kilduff entered and addressed LBJ as “Mr. President.”
Nearly 61 years ago, Dale Carpenter Sr. showed up on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas, hoping to film John F. Kennedy as his motorcade passed. But the president’s car had already gone by, and he recorded only some of the procession, including the back of a car carrying Lyndon Johnson and the side of the White House press bus.
So Mr. Carpenter, a businessman from Texas, rushed to Stemmons Freeway, several miles farther along the motorcade route, to try again.
There, just moments after Kennedy had been shot, he captured an urgent and chaotic scene. The president’s speeding convertible. A Secret Service agent in a dark suit sprawled on the back. Jacqueline Kennedy, in her pink Chanel outfit, little more than a blur.
Kennedy himself could not be glimpsed. He had collapsed and was close to death.
For decades Mr. Carpenter’s 8-millimeter snippets of what transpired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, have been a family heirloom. When he died in 1991 at 77, the reel, which included footage of his twin boys’ birthday party, passed to his wife, Mabel, then to a daughter, Diana, and finally to a grandson, James Gates.
Later this month, the Kennedy footage is to be put up for sale in Boston by RR Auction, the latest in a line of assassination-related images to surface publicly after decades in comparative obscurity. The auction house says it is the only known film of the president’s car on the freeway as it sped from Dealey Plaza, the site of the shooting, to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1 p.m.
Footage shot by Abraham Zapruder, a bystander, has long provided disturbing images of the assassination itself, one of the most traumatic and closely examined events in American history. Mr. Carpenter’s film shows what happened before and just after the Zapruder film was shot. The first section is a prosaic scene of the president’s motorcade; the second, a race for help imbued with all the uncertainty that filled the moments after the gunshots.
Though Mr. Carpenter’s film, just over a minute long, contains nothing likely to affect the debate over Kennedy’s death, several experts said it is still an important addition to the mosaic of images that recorded that day in Dallas.
This story is about a trip I took to look at the files of Freedom House, and the four remarkable pages I found in those files.
Freedom House was the community-based, Black-led nonprofit that helped the city of Boston sell the Washington Park plan to Roxbury’s Black residents. And the files that Freedom House kept of that time period now sit in nearly 90 boxes in the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
I called over and the archives folks warmly welcomed me to browse a small sample of the Freedom House collection. When I arrived, they had set aside two banker’s boxes full of numbered file folders.
It was in box 32, folder 1111 that I struck gold. Or, more accurately, yellow.
Four pages of yellow notepad paper, filled with cursive handwriting. It was a report about a special conference called to address the “Low Income Housing Crisis” in Boston on Nov. 22, 1963.
That date rang a bell. Wasn’t that the day JFK was shot?
It was.
And the memo documents how that tragedy played out in real time 1,700 miles from Dallas’ Dealey Plaza.
The meeting was to address the issue of how urban renewal in 1960s Boston was hurting the city’s poor and people of color, especially the need for low-income housing. When the group broke for lunch the news of Kennedy’s death reached them.
In extraordinarily poetic terms, McGill writes that the group tried to continue with its important work of addressing low-income housing needs, but it was difficult to concentrate.
“… people were sobbing uncontrollably and our spirits kept foundering under the awful waiting vigil our hearts were keeping at the side of the president.”
When Kennedy’s death was confirmed, McGill wrote how the collective weeping grew. She witnessed a priest across the room as his face “crumpled helplessly.”
The attendees abandoned any effort to continue their work, and a closing prayer was offered.
“Charles Abrams was scheduled to deliver a special address at the close of the conference … but he had no heart to give the speech he had prepared. He talked about the tragedy and its implications instead — very briefly. Dr. Barth closed the conference with special prayers for the President, the bereaved family, and for the healing of the sickness of violence and hate in our country.”
Standing in a library basement with these pages in my hand, I was struck by how much that prayer still rings true 61 years later.
A common thread weaves through many of Donald Trump’s picks for his incoming administration, a quality the president-elect values as highly as loyalty and perhaps even more than conventional qualifications: a flair for television.
He has plucked two Fox News stars from their airwaves – Sean Duffy for Transportation secretary and Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon. For the agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid, Trump has turned to Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician known for his health show that aired for 13 seasons. His pick for the Department of Education, meanwhile, is Linda McMahon, who co-founded and built a professional wrestling and entertainment empire alongside her husband.
Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, had a six-year run hosting a Fox News show. Tulsi Gabbard, his selection for director of national intelligence, was a contributor on the conservative network after she left Congress and once subbed for its former primetime host Tucker Carlson.
As a former reality TV star, Trump is deeply attuned to the power of the small screen. His selection process has centered on people who can not only articulate his message but also defend him in the kind of high-stakes, combative settings that define modern media.
His transition team, operating in a war-room style setup at Mar-a-Lago, has embraced this focus. On large screens, his advisers play video clips of potential appointees’ media performances, including footage of them defending Trump but also their past criticism of him, underscoring the centrality of media strategy in his decision-making.
The outcome is a made-for-TV Cabinet who he thinks will sell his agenda to Americans and defend the administration against media scrutiny on their networks. Meanwhile, in some departments, the expectation is that deputies and top staff will oversee the day-to-day operations.
Another comment thread: incompetence and lack of relevant experience.
Matt Gaetz may have withdrawn his name from consideration to become Donald Trump’s attorney general over sexual misconduct accusations — but alleged sexual abuser Pete Hegseth is still fighting to persuade Republican senators to confirm him to one of the most powerful positions in government.
Hegseth was already facing an uphill confirmation battle to become the Secretary of Defense given that he is best known as a Fox News host with no government experience. The emergence of a disturbing sexual assault accusation against him from 2017 isn’t helping matters — and Trump’s team is pissed.
According to four sources familiar with the situation, some top Trump transition officials and others close to the president-elect have been puzzled, if not infuriated, that Hegseth did not preemptively inform them of the allegations against him before they made their way into the press — most notably through the publication of a police report detailing the alleged incident at a hotel in Monterey, California.
“How did he not know? Why didn’t he tell us?” a source close to Trump says. “Pete wasn’t interviewing for a job at McDonald’s; this is the fucking Pentagon! … Even if the allegations are fake, it doesn’t matter because he was supposed to tell us what we needed to know so we could be better prepared to defend him — not learn about it from the media.”
There was, the sources say, a vetting process for the Hegseth pick, but it did not uncover these details, nor was it especially invasive. Trump’s transition team did not sign agreements with the White House or the Justice Department to allow the FBI to conduct background checks on the president-elect’s nominees.
“When we ask, ‘Is there anything else we need to know about?’ that is usually a good time to mention a police report,” a Trump adviser says. “Obviously he remembered that this all happened and there is no way — I don’t think — he could have believed this wouldn’t come out once he got nominated.”
Some Republican senators are privately eager to see the FBI file on Tulsi Gabbard, whose history of alignment with Russia has drawn concern in the wake of her nomination for the post of director of national intelligence, reported Punchbowl News.
Although Gabbard has drawn headlines for previously echoing Russian talking points on topics like the wars in Ukraine and Syria, it’s her support for leaker turned Russian citizen Edward Snowden that is allegedly most troubling for some lawmakers.
The former Democratic congresswoman openly pushed for the U.S. to “drop all charges” against Snowden in a 2020 bill that was co-sponsored by former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, another one-time Trump cabinet nominee who was yesterday forced to withdraw his name amid sexual misconduct allegations he denies.
Lawmakers, including members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is responsible for processing Gabbard’s nomination, reportedly find Gabbard’s support for Snowden—a former NSA employee who leaked state secrets—especially concerning because of the danger his actions posed to national security, reported Punchbowl.
Although FBI file reviews are standard for presidential cabinet candidates, Punchbowl reported that the Republican senators’ interest in doing so seems to suggest that they believe there could still be unknown information in the file—such as potential foreign contacts.
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Friday picked a key figure in Project 2025 to lead the Office of Management and Budget, elevating a longtime ally who has spent the last four years making plans to rework the American government to enhance presidential power.
The would-be nominee, Russell T. Vought, would oversee the White House budget and help determine whether federal agencies comport with the president’s policies. The role requires Senate confirmation unless Mr. Trump is able to make recess appointments.
The choice of Mr. Vought would bring in a strongly ideological figure who played a pivotal role in Mr. Trump’s first term, when he also served as budget chief. Among other things, Mr. Vought helped come up with the idea of having Mr. Trump use emergency power to circumvent Congress’s decision about how much to spend on a border wall.
Mr. Vought was a leading figure in Project 2025, the effort by conservative organizations to build a governing blueprint for Mr. Trump should he take office once again. Mr. Trump tried to distance himself from the effort during his campaign, but he has put forward people with ties to the project for his administration since the election.
Mr. Vought’s role in Project 2025 was to oversee executive orders and other unilateral actions that Mr. Trump could take during his first six months in office, with the goal of tearing down and rebuilding executive branch institutions in a way that would enhance presidential power.
Before Bill Barr became Donald Trump’s third attorney general, he circulated a memo that was more or less an audition tape for the job he ultimately got. That memo reached both the White House Counsel’s Office and Main Justice. In it, Barr argued in favor of what had previously been a fringe theory of a powerful “unitary executive,” in other words, a president able to consolidate power at the expense of the other two branches as a very powerful leader. The writing was on the wall with Barr’s selection, although the Supreme Court cast it in stone when the conservative majority signed off on the view that presidents couldn’t be criminally prosecuted as long as the crimes they committed fell under the umbrella of official acts. Even Bill Barr would have never dreamed of arguing the president could use SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and walk away with no consequences. Now, the Supreme Court says it’s so.
That’s the context that’s essential for understanding Trump’s Friday evening “nomination” (if you can call a social media announcement that) of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought is a proponent of a powerful executive and of restructuring our institutions to facilitate a government that veers toward the monarchical and away from the democratic. He was one of only four out of forty-four of Trump’s cabinet officials from his first administration who said they’d support him this time.
Vought entered OMB at the start of Trump’s first administration and was confirmed as its director in July 2020. In the archive of his official biography, his role is described like this: “he is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the President’s policy, management and regulatory agendas across the Executive Branch.” OMB is a powerful agency, and its director is, in a very real sense, a president’s right-hand man. Among the job experience Vought touts in his bio are his seven years as Vice President of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, which, as readers of Civil Discourse are well aware, is where Project 2025 was incubated….
Now Vought, godfather to Project 2025 and author of its chapter on OMB, will be in charge of administering policy in the next Trump Administration. So much for Trump’s efforts—back when reporting about Project 2025 led to enormous public concern and seemed poised to shift the tide against him— to distance himself from the project. At the time, he disavowed any knowledge of or agreement with the plan, but the claims felt hollow.
I had another sleepless night last night. It seems as if I have insomnia every 2-3 days; then I end up feeling exhausted for a couple of days and having to take naps to make up for the lost sleep. Of course it’s Trump’s fault. I didn’t sleep well during his first term, and now that I know what to expect–chaos, drama, and malevolence–I’m pretty sure my sleep will continue to be disturbed. Anyway, I don’t have much energy today. I just hope I don’t fall asleep on my computer keyboard.
Here’s the latest on Trump’s nightmarish Cabinet picks.
President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to end business-as-usual at the Justice Department apparently include replacing FBI Director Christopher Wray, Vice President-elect JD Vance indicated in a social media post on Tuesday.
Vance revealed he and the president-elect were conducting interviews for the crucial FBI position in a since-deleted post on X. The post was responding to criticism the vice president-elect received for missing a Monday Senate vote that confirmed one of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees to the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“When this 11th Circuit vote happened, I was meeting with President Trump to interview multiple positions for our government, including for FBI Director,” Vance wrote. “I tend to think it’s more important to get an FBI director who will dismantle the deep state than it is for Republicans to lose a vote 49-46 rather than 49-45. But that’s just me.”
Trump nominated former federal prosecutor and Justice Department official Christopher Wray as FBI director in 2017 after abruptly firing his predecessor, James Comey.
However, in recent years, Trump and many in his orbit have soured on Wray, alleging that he hasn’t done enough to root out alleged corruption and political bias at the law enforcement agency. They also fault Wray for allowing his agents to participate in the court-ordered search at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 that led to Trump’s prosecution on charges of hoarding classified documents and obstruction of justice.
It’s looking like Trump will nominate Kash Patel as FBI director. Patel is the guy who defended Trump in the stolen documents scandal, claiming that Trump could declassify any document by just thinking about it.
Donald Trump is keeping his controversial adviser Kash Patel in the running to be the next FBI director, according to two people familiar with the matter, as the transition team conducted interviews for the role on Monday night at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago club.
The existence of the interviews, made public in a since-deleted post by the vice president-elect JD Vance, underscored the intent to fire the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, years before his current term is up….
Trump has a special interest in the FBI, having fired James Comey as director in 2017 over his refusal to close the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and then complaining about perceived disloyalty from Wray.
Clown Torture by Bruce Nauman
Patel’s continued position as a top candidate for the role makes clear Trump’s determination to install loyalists in key national security and law enforcement positions, as well as the support Patel has built up among key Trump allies.
The push for Patel – who has frequently railed against the “deep state” – has come from some of the longest-serving Trump advisers, notably those close to former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, a faction that got Trump’s personal lawyers picked for top justice department roles.
That faction has also suggested to Trump in recent days that if Patel gets passed over for the director role, he should be given the deputy FBI director position, one of the people said – a powerful job that helps run the bureau day to day and is crucially not subject to Senate confirmation.
Click the link to read more about Patel. Basically, he’s a whack job and utterly loyal to Trump.
As everyone knows Trump has nominated Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. Here’s the current drama over the pick.
As Republicans circle the wagons around Matt Gaetz and his nomination to be attorney general, Donald Trump and his surrogates have started calling GOP senators to feel them out on the confirmation battle.
The calls are not going well.
According to three sources familiar with the conversations, Trump and his team are receiving an overwhelmingly negative reaction with regard to Gaetz. One of the sources told NOTUS that multiple senators have even told Trump and his team they won’t be voting to confirm.
There has been a healthy amount of skepticism about Gaetz becoming attorney general since the moment Trump announced his nomination. But the recent controversy over an Ethics Committee report that Gaetz dodged by resigning from Congress has only compounded the problems.
“This fake news will age poorly when Matt Gaetz is sworn in as the Attorney General,” said Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump transition spokesperson.
Given the conversations, there’s growing doubt that Gaetz can actually be confirmed — either by the Senate or through a recess appointment.
“Matt Gaetz is toxic among House Republicans. Among Senate Republicans, he is radioactive,” one of the sources told NOTUS.
GOP senators themselves have intimated that Gaetz will have to go through the normal confirmation process and they have expressed that to Trump.
The House Ethics Committee obtained records, including a check and records of Venmo payments, that appear to show that then-Rep. Matt Gaetz paid more than $10,000 to two women who were later witnesses in sexual misconduct probes conducted by both the House and the Justice Department, according to documents obtained by ABC News.
The Venmo records show that between July 2017 and late January 2019, Gaetz — who was first elected in 2016 — allegedly made 27 Venmo payments totaling $10,224.02 to the two witnesses, who were over the age of 18 at the time.
Scary Clown, by Jennifer Anthony
The payments, which sources said were displayed during closed-door testimony, ranged from $100 to more than $700 each….
ABC News previously reported that House investigators had subpoenaed Venmo for Gaetz’s records and had been showing them to witnesses, asking if they were for sex or drugs. The Venmo records totaling over $10,000 in payments were shown to the witnesses, who testified that some of the payments were from Gaetz and were for sex, a source familiar with the investigation told ABC News.
Gaetz, who was tapped last Wednesday by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as attorney general in the incoming administration, resigned from the House immediately following Trump’s announcement, just days before the House Ethics Committee was to set to consider releasing a report on its investigation into the Florida congressman, according to sources.
An “unknown and unauthorized third party” has gained access to two dozen depositions of witnesses tied to the various investigations into former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, CBS News has learned.
The leaked materials are part of a civil defamation case filed by Chris Dorworth, a lobbyist who is close to Gaetz. These materials include the sworn deposition of the minor with whom Gaetz allegedly had sex.
According to a source familiar with the matter and an email viewed by CBS News, the person who gained access went by the name “Altam Beezley.” [….]
Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee and Justice Department, though federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against him last year. The Ethics panel was looking into allegations the former congressman engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, among other accusations….
An “unknown and unauthorized third party” has gained access to two dozen depositions of witnesses tied to the various investigations into former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, CBS News has learned.
The leaked materials are part of a civil defamation case filed by Chris Dorworth, a lobbyist who is close to Gaetz. These materials include the sworn deposition of the minor with whom Gaetz allegedly had sex.
According to a source familiar with the matter and an email viewed by CBS News, the person who gained access went by the name “Altam Beezley.” [….]
Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee and Justice Department, though federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against him last year. The Ethics panel was looking into allegations the former congressman engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, among other accusations. But Gaetz resigned his seat in the House last week after President-elect Donald Trump announced he had selected the Florida Republican to serve as his attorney general….
Because Gaetz is no longer a House member, the Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction over him has ended.
In his private conversations over the past few days, President-elect Donald J. Trump has admitted that his besieged choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, has less than even odds of being confirmed by the Senate.
But Mr. Trump has shown no sign of withdrawing the nomination, which speaks volumes about his mind-set as he staffs his second administration. He is making calls on Mr. Gaetz’s behalf, and he remains confident that even if Mr. Gaetz does not make it, the standard for an acceptable candidate will have shifted so much that the Senate may simply approve his other nominees who have appalled much of Washington.
Clown, by Rosy Fernandez-Diaz
Mr. Trump’s choice to lead health and human services has made baseless claims about vaccines. His selection for defense secretary is a former Fox News host whose leadership experience has been questioned. His nominee for the director of national intelligence is a favorite of Russian state media.
Presidents do not normally approach cabinet selections this way. Historically, they work with their teams to figure out in advance what the system will tolerate, eliminating the possibility that skeletons in the closet of a nominee might emerge during Senate hearings.
Mr. Trump largely followed this risk-averse approach at the start of his first term. He appointed people like the four-star general Jim Mattis, who was confirmed with a 98-to-1 bipartisan vote to be Mr. Trump’s first defense secretary.
But this time, emboldened by victory and the submission of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump is innovating. He is using an approach that has been discussed in the past for judicial nominees, which is nominating so many extreme choices that they cannot all be blocked. The strategy has never been used for cabinet picks.
It is possible that enough Republican senators are willing to risk their careers to oppose Mr. Gaetz, although it is unclear what the backup plan would be should Mr. Gaetz falter. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and pick for deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, is seen as a possibility.
Donald Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general is a giant middle finger to anyone who believes in the rule of law. But his nominees for other key Justice Department positions may be both more consequential and potentially more dangerous for democracy.
That’s partly because Gaetz is a lazy fool who never tried a federal criminal case and is functionally a “liberal tears” meme made flesh. It’s not that he’s too stupid to be dangerous — he’s clearly going to do his damnedest to prosecute Trump’s enemies. It’s that he’s exactly the kind of venal wastrel who publicly Venmos women for sex. He’s not the type who is going to hunker down and do the hard work of overturning democracy.
Gaetz is the polar opposite of Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, Trump’s first-term AGs, both of whom felt at least some fealty to civic institutions and the rule of law. Sessions had been a US attorney in Alabama, the Alabama AG, and and US senator. Barr was attorney general in the first Bush administration and a consummate DC insider. They were stalwart Republicans willing to do terrible things, but each man reached a point when their own personal ethics prevented them giving Trump what he demanded — for Sessions it was refusing to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, for Barr it was overturning the 2020 election — and both eventually found themselves exiled from the garden.
Perhaps Gaetz’s fecklessness may protect us in the same way that the institutionalism of Sessions and Barr protected us the last time. It’s hard to imagine someone so internet-pilled having the deftness to bury a special counsel report. But this will certainly not be the case with Trump’s personal lawyers, three of whom have already been named as high-ranking Justice Department officials….
These are men (of course they’re all white men) who have some prosecutorial experience, but not a long career of public service. They understand how institutions work, but lack any interest in ensuring that they continue to do so.
Like Gaetz, their loyalty is to Trump. But unlike Gaetz, these guys are smart enough not to make stupid mistakes.
Read the rest at Public Notice.
Clown Group, 1975, by S.J. Mulak
Trump’s outrageous nominee for Secretary of Defense may be a bridge too far for the Trump gang, after he turned out to have a sordid history with women, including sexual assault.
Last week, Donald Trump announced that he had nominated Pete Hegseth, a Fox News commentator and Army National Guard officer, to serve as secretary of Defense in his incoming administration. Hegseth’s selection was immediately met with skepticism with critics pointing to his lack of traditional military-leadership experience as well as his public push for pardoning servicemembers accused of war crimes and against women serving in combat roles.
But in the days since his nomination, it’s emerged that the conservative TV host was accused of sexual assault many years prior. Though Trump appears to be standing by his nomination, the news added another bump to Hegseth’s already rocky path to confirmation. Here’s what we know so far….
Vanity Fair reported last week that the Trump transition team had received word that Hegseth had been accused of sexual misconduct back in 2017. A source told the outlet that Trump attorneys and his newly appointed chief of staff, Susie Wiles, asked Hegseth about the incident, which he characterized as a “he-said, she-said.”
The incident allegedly took place during the 2017 California Federation of Republican Women conference in Monterey, where Hegseth was in attendance. Per the Washington Post, the transition team received a four-page memo detailing an alleged assault by Hegseth of a 30-year-old female staffer for a conservative organization at the hotel, written by a friend of the victim in question. The friend claimed that the woman, whom she only identified as “Jane Doe,” attended the conference with her husband and children, and the woman has since signed a nondisclosure agreement with Hegseth. Adds the Post:
One of [the woman’s] responsibilities at the conference was to make sure Hegseth made it back to his room and left in time the next morning for the 90-minute drive to the airport, the memo said. At some point in the evening, the complaint alleged, Jane Doe received a text from two women at the bar who told her that “Hegseth was getting pushy about his interest in taking them upstairs to his room.” Jane Doe, who was nearby, came over and talked to those two women, and after they left, she “remembered sensing that Hegseth was irritated,” the memo said.
The woman allegedly couldn’t remember everything that happened after that:
According to the memo, Jane Doe “didn’t remember anything until she was in Hegseth’s hotel room and then stumbling to find her hotel room.” The memo said that her memory of six to nine hours “was very hazy,” and that her husband was searching for her and was relieved when she finally showed up. The following day, the woman returned home and “had a moment of hazy memory of being raped the night before, and had a panic attack,” the memo said. The woman then went to the emergency room, where she received a rape-kit examination that “was positive for semen,” the memo said. The woman gave county authorities a statement about what happened, according to the memo sent to the transition team.
In a statement, the City of Monterey confirmed that the local police department investigated an “alleged sexual assault” that occurred in 2017 between 11:59 p.m. on October 7 and 7:00 a.m. on October 8 at 1 Old Golf Course Road, the location of the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel.
There’s more at the link, if you can get past the paywall.
And then there is Hegseth’s “Christian Nationalism.”
During the discussion about Hegseth’s book “Battle For The American Mind,” Hegseth said that he is working to create a system of “classical Christian schools” to provide the recruits for an underground army that will eventually launch an “educational insurgency” to take over the nation.
“I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” said Sumpter.
“That’s what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation,” Hegseth agreed. “Policy answers like school choice, while they’re great, that’s phase two stuff later on once the foothold has been taken, once the recruits have graduated boot camp.”
“We call it a tactical retreat,” Hegseth continued. “We draw out in the last part of the book what an educational insurgency would look like, because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao [Zedong] wrote about. We’re in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate, and reorganize. And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.”
“It’s becoming a real possibility,” a source told the outlet’s special correspondent Gabriel Sherman.
The source said that the Trump team was taken by surprise after a serious sexual assault allegation against Hegseth came to light, which led Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles to question the former Fox News host on a call last week. Hegseth was never charged with a crime and denies the allegations.
“People are upset about the distraction. The general feeling is Pete hasn’t been honest,” a second source told Vanity Fair.
Maybe he can give the job to Kash Patel if he doesn’t get the FBI directorship.
Perhaps the scariest nominee so far is Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi is a flat out Russian asset, and she’s also close to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Representative Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to remedy what American policy makers believed was a lack of coordination among the various national-intelligence agencies, and the DNI sits atop all of America’s intelligence services, including the CIA.
Gabbard is stunningly unqualified for almost any Cabinet post (as are some of Trump’s other picks), but especially for ODNI. She has no qualifications as an intelligence professional—literally none. (She is a reserve lieutenant colonel who previously served in the Hawaii Army National Guard, with assignments in medical, police, and civil-affairs-support positions. She has won some local elections and also represented Hawaii in Congress.) She has no significant experience directing or managing much of anything.
Scary Clown, Tony Rubino
But leave aside for the moment that she is manifestly unprepared to run any kind of agency. Americans usually accept that presidents reward loyalists with jobs, and Trump has the right to stash Gabbard at some make-work office in the bureaucracy if he feels he owes her. It’s not a pretty tradition, but it’s not unprecedented, either.
To make Tulsi Gabbard the DNI, however, is not merely handing a bouquet to a political gadfly. Her appointment would be a threat to the security of the United States.
Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, attempting to position herself as something like a peace candidate. But she’s no peacemaker: She’s been an apologist for both the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Her politics, which are otherwise incoherent, tend to be sympathetic to these two strongmen, painting America as the problem and the dictators as misunderstood. Hawaii voters have long been perplexed by the way she’s positioned herself politically. But Gabbard is a classic case of “horseshoe” politics: Her views can seem both extremely left and extremely right, which is probably why people such as Tucker Carlson—a conservative who has turned into … whatever pro-Russia right-wingers are called now—have taken a liking to the former Democrat (who was previously a Republican and is now again a member of the GOP).
On the Putin connection:
Gabbard’s shilling for Assad is a mystery, but she’s even more dedicated to carrying Putin’s water. Tom Rogan, a conservative writer and hardly a liberal handwringer, summed up her record succinctly in the Washington Examiner today:
She has blamed NATO and the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (again, to the celebration of both Russian and Chinese state media), has repeated Russian propaganda claims that the U.S. has set up secret bioweapons labs in that country, and has argued that the U.S. not Russia is wholly responsible for Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship.
When she appeared on Sean Hannity’s show in 2022, even Hannity blanched at Gabbard floating off in a haze of Kremlin talking points and cheerleading for Russia. When Hannity is trying to shepherd you back toward the air lock before your oxygen runs out, you’ve gone pretty far out there.
A person with Gabbard’s views should not be allowed anywhere near the crown jewels of American intelligence. I have no idea why Trump nominated Gabbard; she’s been a supporter, but she hasn’t been central to his campaign, and he owes her very little. For someone as grubbily transactional as Trump, it’s not an appointment that makes much sense. It’s possible that Trump hates the intelligence community—which he blames for many of his first-term troubles—so much that Gabbard is his revenge. Or maybe he just likes the way she handles herself on television.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.”
Those are my recommended reads for today. The good news is that the worst hasn’t happened yet. We are still living in a sort of democracy.
Take care, everyone.
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Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has been elected Senate majority leader, setting the stage for him to replace retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has held the top Senate GOP leadership job for the past 18 years.
Thune has served as Senate Republican whip, the No. 2-ranking position in the Senate GOP leadership, since 2019, and largely managed operation of the Senate floor since McConnell suffered a concussion from a fall in 2023.
Thune beat Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) by a vote of 25 to 24, according to two sources familiar.
Thune led after the first ballot. He won 25 votes while Cornyn won 15 votes and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) collected 13 votes.
“I am extremely honored to have earned the support of my colleagues to lead the Senate in the 119th Congress, and I am beyond proud of the work we have done to secure our majority and the White House,” he said in a statement after the vote. “This Republican team is united behind President Trump’s agenda, and our work starts today.”
And So It Begins . . . Trump’s appoints all the best people:
This is like 2016 only so much worse. For the past couple of days, Trump has been announcing his picks for the Cabinet and other important government posts, and his choices are even worse than we could have imagined.
Trump announced his choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which I guess is sort of reasonable. But it’s likely that one reason for appointing Rubio would be to open up the Senate seat in Florida so that he can give it to Lara Trump. Eventually, Trump will likely fire Rubio in humiliating fashion.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will have a chance to put another stamp on state politics with a big appointment if Sen. Marco Rubio becomes secretary of state. But one major question hangs over that opportunity: How badly does President-elect Donald Trump want his daughter-in-law, Lara, to become a U.S. senator?
Lara Trump, future Senator?
DeSantis, like any Florida governor, has the ability to unilaterally appoint the person who would fill a vacant Senate seat, which may come into play following Monday’s news of Trump’s expected nomination of Rubio to lead the State Department. Trump could still change his mind, cautioned three sources familiar with the selection process, who said the decision wouldn’t be final until the president-elect makes a formal announcement.
But if Rubio’s Senate seat becomes open, there is little doubt DeSantis will face at least some pressure from Trump’s team to appoint a candidate they want, which would almost certainly be Lara Trump, according to seven people tracking deliberations around the potential vacancy.
Perhaps the worst appointment so far came yesterday with the announcement that Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth will serve as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is the person who urged Trump to pardon war criminal Eddie Gallagher.
The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.
“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”
Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
Eddie Gallagher
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
Such dire descriptions of Chief Gallagher, who had eight combat deployments and sometimes went by the nickname Blade, are in marked contrast to Mr. Trump’s portrayal of him at a recent political rally in Florida as one of “our great fighters.” [….]
Video from a SEAL’s helmet camera, included in the trove of materials, shows the barely conscious captive — a teenage Islamic State fighter so thin that his watch slid easily up and down his arm — being brought in to the platoon one day in May 2017. Then the helmet camera is shut off.
In the video interviews with investigators, three SEALs said they saw Chief Gallagher go on to stab the sedated captive for no reason, and then hold an impromptu re-enlistment ceremony over the body, as if it were a trophy.
“I was listening to it, and I was just thinking, like, this is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Special Operator Miller, who has since been promoted to chief, told investigators.
Hegseth is famous at Fox News for announcing that for ten years he never washed his hands.
Hegseth’s selection was a surprise, as he was not among those considered as a likely pick by members of Trump’s team, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN.
Sources said that it came down to Trump having a longstanding relationship with Hegseth, noting that the president-elect always thought he was “smart” and was impressed by his career. Trump also likes that Hegseth is a military veteran and the account of his service in his book, the sources said.
While Hegseth’s name had not been on the initial shortlist, Trump was struggling to land on a choice for the job, and he liked Hegseth from Trump’s last term when he briefly considered him for leading the Department of Veterans Affairs before being warned that he may not get confirmed by the Senate, one source familiar said.
“Trump also thinks he has the look,” one source said….
Trump’s choice of Hegseth is a notable departure from his picks for defense secretary in his first term, when he selected a four-star general, James Mattis, and an Army secretary, Mark Esper, to lead the Pentagon. But Trump ultimately soured on both of those secretaries and was sharply critical of them after Mattis resigned and Esper was fired.
One defense official told CNN, “Everyone is simply shocked.” Another Pentagon official who was following the potential picks for defense secretary learned about the possibility of Hegseth only in the hours before the nomination and, like others who spoke on condition of anonymity with CNN, didn’t know how to react.
Even some former Trump officials who have remained close to former colleagues and have been in touch with the transition were caught off guard. One former Trump official also said they were “shocked” by the selection and expect there’s going to be an effort to “take him down.”
Indeed, in choosing Hegseth, Trump has likely set off what could be his first contentious confirmation fight for a Cabinet pick. While Senate Republicans newly in the majority are likely to be deferential to Trump’s selections, Trump’s nominees can only afford to lose a handful of Republicans to win confirmation.
The article notes that Hegseth opposes women serving in combat. A bit more info:
The Princeton and Harvard grad also served as CEO for veterans advocacy organization Concerned Veterans for America and holds two Bronze Stars, according to Simon & Schuster, the company that published his 2017 book “In the Arena.”
Hegseth says he was removed from inauguration duty in 2021 because of what he described as a religious tattoo.
In his book, Hegseth wrote that he had served under former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump. His unit was tasked to work the inauguration of Joe Biden as well on January 20, 2021.
“Ultimately, members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo,” Hegseth told Fox News during an interview promoting his book in June. Hegseth said the tattoo is a Jerusalem cross.
Hegseth first job will probably be to lead a purge of generals who are not sufficiently loyal to Trump.
Trump’s transition team has a “warrior board” executive order ready for the president-elect’s desk.
An executive order draft is floating around MAGA world that would establish a Trump-appointed “warrior board” with the power to purge any three- or four-star generals as it sees fit. The board would send its dismissal recommendations to Trump and they would be acted upon within 30 days.
The draft executive order, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, makes it easy to quickly remove military officials “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” but leaves open the question of what those requisite qualities are. The executive order draws on General George C. Marshall’s 1940 creation of a “plucking board” led by retired general officers to “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” But that plucking board was to uplift young officers with high potential, not to cull anyone not perfectly aligned with MAGA.
It’s not yet clear if Trump will sign the executive order, but Trump has held vitriol toward certain military leaders for some time now. He has vowed to weaponize them against the “enemy within,” to fire anyone involved in the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and to create a task force to weed out “woke generals.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Fox News host Pete Hegseth as his nominee for defense secretary would place atop the Pentagon a combat veteran and political ally who has assailed the military as ineffective and “woke,” mused about firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,and blasted the top brass as having failed to safeguard American strength.
Hegseth’s nomination suggests a coming battle over social and personnel issues within the armed forces, historically one of the nation’s most diverse institutions. He has been among Trump’s most high-profile supporters to champion the cause of rolling back initiatives designed to promote diversity.
Throughout his campaign, Trump made a distinction between fighting generals and “woke” generals, vowing to fire the latter. Asked in a podcast interview with the “Shawn Ryan Show” published last week what he would do, Hegseth set a tone that looks ominous for senior Pentagon officials.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said, referring to Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. “Any general, any admiral, whatever,” who was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or “woke s—” has “got to go,” Hegseth said.
Now that Ivanka has stepped back from politics, it seems that Don Jr. has become an important adviser to Trump, according the WaPo article:
His [Hegseth’s] nomination represents a major victory for Donald Trump Jr., who has lobbied for the inclusion of more unorthodox candidates, such as Vice President-elect JD Vance and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, against the wishes of establishment Republicans who favored filling key administration roles with those they see as more traditional choices, such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
The breakneck speed of the Hegseth nomination also underscores the value Trump places on TV personalities who have used their platform to promote his agenda.
It’s difficult to believe that Senate Republicans would confirm this nomination, but Trump has demanded that the Senate stay in recess at the beginning of his term so he can put his corrupt choices in place though recess appointments.
Some more appointments that Trump announced yesterday: Mike Huckabee to be Ambassador to Israel; Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a government efficiency department.
A month ago, billionaire Elon Musk warned that if Donald Trump won a second presidential term and gave him a role in government, Americans would need to “reduce spending to live within our means” and suffer “temporary hardship” in order to address the national debt. On Tuesday, the Tesla CEO seemed closer to achieving that goal after the president-elect announced Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).
The two entrepreneurs will be tasked with paving the way for Trump’s administration “to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump said in a statement.
Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk
He added that DOGE could “become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time” and that the department would partner with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Exactly how DOGE would “provide advice and guidance from outside of government” was not clear.
In the statement shared by Trump, Musk declared that DOGE “will send shockwaves through the system and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”
“Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending. They will work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE,’” Trump continued. The president-elect ended by stating DOGE’s work will “conclude” no later than July 4, 2026, and that a “smaller government” will be the “perfect gift” to the American people, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Presumably, the DOGE will not tamper with all the government contracts that Musk’s companies receive.
Apparently Musk is still in Trump’s good graces, but he’s wearing out his welcome with many staff members and other Mar-a-Lago denizens. He has been horning in on Trump’s meetings and phone calls. Musk even wanted to go along with Trump for his meeting with President Joe Biden today!
In nearly every meeting that President-elect Donald J. Trump holds at Mar-a-Lago, alongside him is someone who has been elected to nothing, nominated to nothing and, only a few months ago, had no meaningful relationship with him.
Elon Musk.
The world’s richest person has ascended to a position of extraordinary, unofficial influence in Mr. Trump’s transition process, playing a role that makes him indisputably America’s most powerful private citizen. He has sat in on nearly every job interview with the Trump team and bonded with the Trump family, and he is trying to install his Silicon Valley friends in plum positions in the next administration.
Mr. Musk has assumed an almost mythical aura in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. At Mar-a-Lago one recent evening, he walked into the dining room about 30 minutes after the president-elect did and received a similar standing ovation, according to two people who saw him enter.
Mr. Musk, often with his 4-year-old son X on his lap, has spent most of the last week at Mar-a-Lago, joining not just interviews but almost every meeting and many meals that Mr. Trump has had. He briefly shuttled back to Austin, Texas, where he has a $35 million compound, before returning on Friday, where he ate in Mar-a-Lago’s dining room and on its patio, roamed the gift shop and spent time on the golf course — all alongside the president-elect.
“I’m happy to be the first buddy!” he replied to a social-media follower this weekend.
Elon Musk on Wednesday joined President-elect Donald Trump for his first post-election meeting with the House Republican conference in Washington, D.C., an adviser to Trump told NBC News. Trump and Musk flew to the nation’s capital together from Florida aboard Trump’s plane.
The development is the latest example of how Musk, the world’s richest man and one of the top backers of Trump’s winning campaign, has grown his presence and influence in the future president’s orbit.
ELON BUTTS IN — Later this morning, Trump travels to Washington for the first time since his sweeping presidential victory last week, where he’ll make the customary visit to the White House and huddle with allies on Capitol Hill.
Earlier this week, however, Trump’s inner circle was abuzz that he might have a traveling companion for the trip: not wife MELANIA, who is remaining in Florida, but ELON MUSK — who privately expressed interest in joining Trump for his visit with President JOE BIDEN, to the vexation of some Trump insiders.
To be fair, there have been few boundaries on Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign and now in his transition. Last night, Trump announced that Musk would co-lead a “Department of Government Efficiency” — a sort of meme-ified Simpson-Bowles commission — alongside MAGA hype man VIVEK RAMASWAMY.
But the notion of allowing Musk to tag along to the White House, for a hallowed ritual in the peaceful transfer of power, prompted a bewildered reaction inside Trump world: Was that even allowed?What was the protocol for such a thing?
As of last night, it appears the plan might not materialize. After appearing earlier this week on a draft manifest for this morning’s flight to D.C., we couldn’t get a clear answer last night on whether Musk is coming or not.
The bigger picture, however, is how Musk is starting to wear out his welcome with some in Trump’s orbit. After initially making a huge splash with his endorsement, made just moments after the July attempt on Trump’s life, some insiders now say he’s become almost a comical distraction, hanging around Mar-a-Lago, sidling into high-level transition meetings and giving unsolicited feedback on Trump’s personnel decisions.
“Elon is getting a little big for his britches,” one insider tells Playbook.
Trump, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind, relishing the attention he’s getting from the richest man in the world. Over the weekend, our colleagues Meridith McGraw and Natalie Allison reported, Trump was zipping Musk around in his golf cart, introducing him to club members and showing him the resort’s gift shop.
That proximity has given Musk access to some of the most intimate details of the Trump transition. For example: While much was made about Musk joining Trump’s recent call with Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, we’re told that the encounter was more or less a fluke: Musk happened to be in the room when Zelenskyy called, and Trump put him on the phone.
I could go on, but this post is already too long. I have no doubt there will be more horrors to deal with today. today.
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I’ve been having computer problems, so I’m even later than usual in getting started today. It might be nighttime before a finish this post.
I’m so stressed out about the election! I just hope I make it until next Tuesday.
I keep telling myself that Kamala Harris will win, and I do think she will; but then we’ll have to deal with the Trumpers who won’t accept the results. Even if we get by that crisis, the Supreme Could could step in. She has to win by 4 or 5 points so they can’t justify handing the presidency to Trump.
Fortunately, Trump hasn’t exactly helped his case over the past week.
Two full days have passed since Donald Trump presided over a Madison Square Garden rally meant to illuminate the high notes of his presidential campaign. In that regard, it was extraordinarily successful.
After all, the torrent of bigotry, hostility, upheaval, misogyny, lunacy, fratboy antics, propaganda, dread and racism that flowed out of the gathering have been Trump’s animating themes ever since he vaulted onto the political stage more than nine years ago.
Anyone watching the bonfire in the Garden got a visceral understanding of Trump’s worldview. So, mission accomplished. Educating and recruiting new voters, and reminding those already committed why they’ve climbed aboard, is a primary goal of any campaign. Sunday’s rally was a handy primer about what Trump is fighting for — and the former president and his fellow speakers were transparent about what they’re up to. Three cheers for honesty.
Bedlam, fascism and racism aren’t attractive calling cards for every voter, however, and Republican strategists who have tried putting Trump on a less frightening path certainly didn’t want the Garden’s narrative to define their candidate with Election Day fast approaching. Limited government, America first, tax cuts, deregulation, patriotism, prosperity and other varieties of spinach were on their preferred menu.
I like to think that most people would be horrified by the prospect of being publicly savaged for fomenting racism and chaos — and for hosting a Garden lineup that included shock-jock Tucker Carlson wrapping Kamala Harris in a shroud of plantation bigotry and a C-list “comedian” quipping that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.” Trump rolls without regret, however. He has had multiple opportunities to change course, disavow or apologize for the bile on display at the Garden, but he hasn’t done so — including on Tuesday during a nationally broadcast press conference in Palm Beach, Florida, and at a rally later in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Read the rest at Bloomberg. I didn’t encounter a paywall on this one.
PALM BEACH, Florida — Donald Trump during remarks on Tuesday didn’t acknowledge that there was any backlash over a comedian who made disparaging comments about Puerto Rico at a recent rally in New York City.
“The love in that room, it was breathtaking — and you could have filled it many many times with the people that were unable to get in,” he said of his Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden.
Trump told ABC News’ Rachel Scott before the press conference that he wasn’t familiar with the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
“I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” he told ABC News.
His speech on Tuesday before an audience of hundreds of supporters in South Florida largely appeared to be geared toward counter-messaging the campaign rally Vice President Kamala Harris had set for Tuesday evening. The vice president is expected to deliver the closing message of her campaign on the Ellipse just off the National Mall in D.C.
Since Trump’s rally Sunday — when Hinchcliffe and other speakers at the event made racist and vulgar comments — Puerto Ricans, Democrats and Republicans have condemned the speakers and defended the island. Trump has not publicly condemned the comments, while Puerto Ricans, including the archbishop of San Juan and the Republican chair of the island, have called on the former president to apologize though he has not done so.
People of Puerto Rican descent in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, who number more than 450,000, have also denounced the comedian’s comments and some are planning to protest Trump’s rally Tuesday night in Allentown, which has one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans in the state.
Trump called Harris’ political operation a “campaign of hate” and said President Joe Biden had been “out of it for a long time.” He did not take any questions from the media after speaking for about an hour and tore into some Democrats who’d compared his rally to Nazi Germany.
Urged by some allies to apologize for racist comments made by speakers at his weekend rally, Donald Trump took the opposite approach on Tuesday, saying it was an “honor to be involved” in such an event and calling the scene a “lovefest” — the same term he has used to describe the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump gathered supporters and reporters to his Mar-a-Lago resort two days after a massive rally at Madison Square Garden featured a number of crude remarks by various speakers, including a set by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe in which he joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” Some of Trump’s top Republican allies have condemned the remarks, and his campaign took the rare step of publicly distancing itself from Hinchcliffe’s joke, though not the other comments.
But given the opportunity to apologize at multiple events and in interviews Tuesday, Trump instead leaned in. Speaking at his Florida resort, he said that “there’s never been an event so beautiful” as his Sunday rally in his hometown of New York.
“The love in that room. It was breathtaking,” he said. “It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest. And it was my honor to be involved.”
On Tuesday night, he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he knows nothing about Hinchcliffe but said, “I can’t imagine it’s a big deal.” He later agreed, though, that “probably he shouldn’t have been there.”
“America, we know what Donald Trump has in mind. More chaos. More division. And policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else. I offer a different path. And I ask for your vote,” Harris told the crowd.
“And here is my pledge to you: I pledge to seek common ground and common sense solutions to make your lives better,” she added. “I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”
The message could not be more different than Trump’s speech at the site, where he made false claims about the election and railed against Republicans who would not go along with his plan to halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 win.
Though Trump told supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard, the Republican also used the speech to pressure his vice president, Mike Pence, to suspend the certification and called on MAGA fans to “fight like hell” to preserve their country.
Vice President Harris delivered a speech Tuesday on the White House Ellipse in Washington, D.C. — the very site at which former President Trump gave remarks to a crowd that later incited a riot at the Capitol.
Harris spoke to a fired-up audience that numbered in the tens of thousands, invoking many of the same warnings she’s made on the campaign trail about Trump in her speech —that he is a threat to democracy and is consumed by his grievances and desire for retribution.
She encouraged the crowd and voters to move on from the Trump political era — and rounded out her speech by calling him a “petty tyrant.”
“We have to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms. It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division. It is time for a new generation in America, and I am ready to offer that leadership as the next president of the United States of America,” Harris said.
Harris was flanked for her speech by large blue USA signs on either side of her with the White House lit up in the background. The Harris campaign estimated 75,000 people were on the National Mall just before she arrived.
Harris later in her speech said that patriots throughout history “did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.”
“The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised,” the vice president said.
In the days since Donald Trump‘s hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, what’s striking is the pettiness of the stakes MAGA defenders have laid out. In the final days of a dead-heat contest for the most powerful office in the world, Republicans argued we must elect a textbook fascist to protect the sacrosanct right of a white man to be rude without being criticized for it.
Trump, however, dispensed with the fiction that we are debating the subjective quality of humor. At a Tuesday press conference, he simply reified the true MAGA belief at stake: that Trump and his allies get to say what they want, and everyone else must shut up about it. This mostly came in the form of griping that Michelle Obama was allowed to criticize him: “Obama, his wife was very nasty to me. That was not nice.” [….]
Vance did not ask Trump to “stop getting so offended.” [….]
One would hope that it’s self-evident that “revenge on liberals for not liking me” is both a pathetic and short-sighted justification for voting for a wannabe dictator with a criminal rap sheet the size of a Russian novel. But with the polls so tight, that’s apparently not the case. So Harris made her closing argument Tuesday night from an evocative location that underscored the actual stakes of the election: The Ellipse in Washington D.C. where Trump incited the January 6 insurrection.
MAGA spite might right now manifest mainly as racist trolling or bottomless bellyaching, she warned, but there’s real danger in putting a man “consumed with grievance” into the White House. “He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election,” she began. She noted that Trump has threatened “to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him” and “put them in jail.” For those who might scoff that Trump actually means these things, the location spoke for itself. It was less than four years ago that Trump stood at that same spot and sent a murderous mob after members of Congress and his vice president as punishment for not stealing an election for him.
Read the rest at Salon.
Unfortunately, Joe Biden made one of his trademarked gaffes yesterday, and the media are breathlessly reporting that he called Trump’s supporters “garbage.” The clip that Trumpers are circulating was edited though. The Guardian reports: Biden says ‘garbage’ remark was aimed at comedian, not Trump supporters.
Joe Biden put out a statement that he had “meant to say” earlier on Tuesday that a pro-Trump comedian’s “hateful rhetoric” about Puerto Rico was “garbage”. But in a video clip edited to a shorter version and already widely circulating on social media Tuesday evening, a phrase that came out of Biden’s mouth was “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters”.
Republican politicians and rightwing media outlets quickly picked up the clip to argue that Biden had called Trump’s supporters garbage, comparing his remarks to Hillary Clinton’s labeling of half of Trump supporters as belonging in “a basket of deplorables” in 2016, a comment that is widely seen as undermining her campaign.
Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I meant to say. The…
Biden’s full comments on Tuesday are somewhat garbled, and some journalists transcribing the remarks argued that Biden really did seem to be trying to refer to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s remarks, not all of Trump’s supporters, while others reported that the president had indeed suggested that Trump supporters themselves were garbage.
Biden’s comment came during a Zoom call with Voto Latino, in which Biden referred to Hinchcliffe’s comments and said the Puerto Ricans he knows are “good, decent, honorable, people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of things is unconscionable, and it’s un-American, and it’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done.” But it wasn’t entirely clear whether he had said the singular “supporter’s” or the plural “supporters”, describing Trump’s base more broadly.
In the official transcript of Biden’s remarks released on Tuesday night by the White House press office, the comment has an apostrophe: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”Nevertheless, Harris addressed the firestorm.
Vice President Kamala Harris says she “strongly” disagrees with “any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” after President Biden on Tuesday made remarks in which he appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage” on a video call with Latino activists. Republicans seized on the comment, while the White House offered a different explanation of what Mr. Biden had said, and the president tweeted a clarification of his comment.
“Let me be clear, I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” Harris told reporters Wednesday morning, when she was asked about Mr. Biden’s “garbage” comment. “You heard my speech last night and continuously throughout my career: I believe that the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not. And as president of the United States, I will be a president for all Americans, whether you vote for me or not.”
I’ll close by recommending two other important articles, one on the abortion issue, and the other on what could happen if Trump wins.
Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.
The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.
But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.
Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.
Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.
Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.
ProPublica is telling these women’s stories this week, starting with Barnica’s. Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”
What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs?
Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?
What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?
Or if your teenage granddaughter, alone and afraid, calls you and begs you to drive her to a state where abortion is legal? Your governor has signed a bill making such “abortion trafficking” illegal, stipulating a penalty of 15 years.
What will you do if you’re called to serve on the jury hearing the grandmother’s case? She is guilty beyond a hint of a reasonable doubt; no way around that. Do you vote to convict her, or do you hold out against 11 of your peers?
LET’S SAY YOU ARE AN ATTORNEY in North Carolina, working out of your home. You sometimes serve as a court-appointed lawyer. Mysterious figures from something called “Gov Ops” appear at your door and claim power to rifle through your files without a warrant or any deference to attorney-client privilege.
They do not say what they are looking for. It could be public records proving government malfeasance, or private medical records of a client seeking an abortion, or communications involving legislative redistricting, or anything else they want to take. This is all because of a provision snuck into the state budget by the Republican legislative leadership that authorizes this new secret police force to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who does work for the state. You are also advised that if you say anything about this raid to anyone, you will be breaking the law.
What if you work in the North Carolina legislature, and your boss hands you a document to shred? It shows him to have broken the law. Given that the same budget provision lets any legislator unilaterally decide whether to “retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of” any public record, what is your choice? [….]
What if you are a law enforcement officer ordered to arrest more Black people by a city administration that fears federal intervention should the police fall below a certain quota of minority arrests? After all, Project 2025 recommends that local officials face “legal action” if they “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions,” and refuse to arrest “those who … actually commit crimes.”
What will you do if you are a federal prison guard shipped from Texas to police a protest in some faraway city, and are ordered not to identify yourself, nor wear any identifying badge? [….]
DONALD TRUMP SAID, BEFORE A JEWISH AUDIENCE this past September 19, that “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with his loss, if he loses. Let’s say Donald Trump loses. You are a rabbi leading a congregation with prominent Trump supporters among its members. Now, for the Sabbath after the election, you have a sermon to write, which some of those members will be present to hear. Meanwhile, strange, scary men have been seen lurking about the grounds.
What do you say?
There’s much more, and it’s terrifying; but I think it’s important to read the whole thing.
That’s all I have for you today. Take care everyone and vote!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. I was 15 years old, a junior in high school. I still see that day as a defining event in my life. It was my first real experience of death, and I recall how difficult it was for me to comprehend and accept that our brilliant and charismatic president was really gone forever. It was my first lesson in how quickly dramatic events can change our understanding of the world.
Later this month, the Kennedy footage is to be put up for sale in Boston by RR Auction, the latest in a line of assassination-related images to surface publicly after decades in comparative obscurity. The auction house says it is the only known film of the president’s car on the freeway as it sped from Dealey Plaza, the site of the shooting, to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1 p.m.
The meeting was to address the issue of how urban renewal in 1960s Boston was hurting the city’s poor and people of color, especially the need for low-income housing. When the group broke for lunch the news of Kennedy’s death reached them.
As a former reality TV star, Trump is deeply attuned to the power of the small screen. His selection process has centered on people who can not only articulate his message but also defend him in the kind of high-stakes, combative settings that define modern media.
The former Democratic congresswoman 
That’s the context that’s essential for understanding Trump’s Friday evening “nomination” (if you can call a social media announcement that) of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought is a proponent of a powerful executive and of restructuring our institutions to facilitate a government that veers toward the monarchical and away from the democratic. He was 
Trump told ABC News’ Rachel Scott before the press conference that he wasn’t familiar with the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
Most of the racist diatribes at Trump’s New York City rally were not jokes. But the comments getting the most media attention — 
Nevertheless, Harris addressed the tempest in a teapot. CBS News: 
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