Soon after the 2020 election, as President Donald Trump was gearing up his efforts to retain power despite his loss, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper was dismissed from his position.
Mostly Monday Reads: Which Century are we in?
Posted: May 5, 2025 Filed under: American Fascists, kakistocracy, religious extremists, Republicans against democracy, SCOTUS, tariffs, Threats to Democracy, Treason and Sedition Republican Style, Unitary Executive Authority | Tags: @repeat1968, Camp Alcatraz, Crazy #FARTUS Policies, Donald Trump, John Buss, misogyny, SCOTUS, Social Security, Theory of Unitary Executive, Trump Tariffs, unemployment 13 Comments
“Size matters.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Every time I get the grocery list together these days, I think about what I need to bulk order. It’s really hard to look at a finished consumer good and find all the value-added producers along with their various locations. I wonder how the distributors are going to sort this all out. I noticed prices creeping up in the usual items. I’m pretty sure my sister has hit Costco by now and filled up the pantry. I also watched the last of the Jazz Festers leave with relief. I bet this was their last jaunt of the year. You can see it in the numbers.
USA Today had this analysis by Betty Lin-Fisher. “How will Trump’s tariffs affect grocery store prices? We explain.”
While higher tariffs could still be coming after a 90-day-pause, the baseline 10% tariff on all goods, plus higher duties on Chinese products already in effect are a big increase in food costs for American’s budgets, said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at The Consumer Federation of America.
“The 10% ‘default’ tariffs alone represent a truly historic federal tax increase, maybe the largest in my lifetime, with a highly regressive impact,” Gremillion said.
The tariff only applies to the value of the product at the border, Ortega said. Then there are additional costs to the product, which are accrued domestically, like transporting the goods to the store, distribution, wholesale costs and retail markups. Those things are not subject to the tariff, Ortega said.
So that doesn’t mean that the price of a particular product will go up by 10% or whatever the tariff is, Ortega said.
Overall, 15% of the U.S. food supply is imported, including 32% of fresh vegetables, 55% of fresh fruit, and 94% of seafood, according to the Consumer Federation of America, citing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Some products, like coffee and bananas, are almost exclusively grown abroad.
Tariffs are causing uncertainty from families checking off their grocery lists to companies importing food, he said.
“For consumers, this can mean added difficulties in managing a food budget. For food companies, this means havoc on supply chains that could lead to more food waste and more food safety risk,” Gremillion said.
Yup. And the FDA will not be looking around for that food safety risk now. It’s also upending Health Care, but we can rest knowing that all those generic names for medicine and things will be gender neutral now. I know I can’t even properly pronounce most of them, let alone identify their sexual preferences. MEDTECHDIVE has this headline: Trump policies are upending healthcare technology. “Track the effect on the medtech industry here. Policies and actions reshaping the healthcare industry began pouring out of President Donald Trump’s White House nearly from day one. Follow the changes affecting the medical device industry.”
Did I mention the youngest son-in-law is a biomedical engineer who is in charge of designing medical, surgical, and prosthetic devices? Plus, the oldest daughter and son-in-law are doctors. It’s just me and my youngest daughter out here trying to figure out what the economy and financial markets are experiencing. The others are just trying to deal with that, and the usual helpful regulations are being replaced with crazy ones.
Since Trump took office in late January, multiple Food and Drug Administration webpages were removed (and then restored); employees were fired from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (and some were asked back); and the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a plan to lay off approximately 10,000 employees, including about 3,500 at the FDA.
Meanwhile, the economy has whipsawed due to an unpredictable and aggressive tariff strategy. Later, however, pieces were delayed or walked back.
The Trump administration has reshaped the medtech industry in significant ways, and potentially long-term, in just a few months. Now that Trump has settled into power, new questions have arisen about what the many changes will mean for companies and patients, and what’s coming next.
Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon
Also, lucky us, Medicare and Medicaid modernization with be the goal of TV snake oil salesman Dr. Mehmet Oz as he takes over both. This is also from the MEDTECHDIVE.
Dr. Mehmet Oz was sworn in as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator on April 18, cementing his role as head of the agency that provides insurance coverage to millions of Americans.
During a ceremony at the Oval Office, Oz, a physician and former TV personality, said he wanted to “save” the nation’s public health programs and focus on reducing chronic disease, “modernizing” Medicare and Medicaid, and targeting fraud, waste and abuse in government insurance offerings.
President Donald Trump reiterated that Republicans wouldn’t cut Medicare or Medicaid. “Just as I promised, there will be no cuts. We’re not going to have any cuts. We’re going to have only help,” he said during the ceremony.
As I’ve spent most of this year being poked, prodded, pricked, shocked, MRI’d, Ultrasound’d, and EMG’d, I sure don’t feel good about any of this. I fret about someone disappearing all of that, plus my Social Security.
Speaking of crazy policy, I happened on this last night. This is from NBC News. “Trump says he will reopen ‘enlarged and rebuilt’ Alcatraz prison. Alcatraz Island hasn’t been used as a federal penitentiary since 1963. It had a capacity of roughly 300 people.” I’m actually thinking this is another one of his threats to Judges since it’s way too small to hold many prisoners. I suppose that’s one way to destroy a national park and the US Constitution in one sweep.
Alcatraz Island, a former military fortress and prison in San Francisco Bay, was turned into a federal penitentiary in 1934 and over the course of 29 years housed more than 1,500 people “deemed difficult to incarcerate elsewhere in the federal prison system,” according to the National Park Service.
According to aNational Park Service study, it was initially deemed unfit to serve as a federal institution because of its small size, isolated location and lack of fresh water. However, Sanford Bates, the director of the Bureau of Prisons in 1933,later found it “an ideal place of confinement for about 200 of the most desperate or irredeemable types.” It was formally opened as a federal penitentiary the next year.
Trump suggested in his post that he’d like to restore the facility to that purpose.
This is from Ed Mazza writing for HuffPo. This sounds a lot like his real estate deals to me. “‘Clearly Unhinged’: Critics Sink Trump’s ‘Asinine’ Plan To Reopen Alcatraz Prison. The president wants to turn the site back into a penitentiary despite the fact that it would cost a fortune.”
Alcatraz is currently part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and has about 1.2 million visitors per year. Those who tour the island in San Francisco Bay see facilities in various states of decay. The prison was crumbling even as it was still in operation, and the high cost of maintaining it was a key reason it was shuttered in 1963.
Given those realities, restoring Alcatraz and then expanding it, as Trump called for on his Truth Social platform, would likely cost a fortune ― and then another pile of cash would be needed to maintain it.
Reopening it as a prison would also mean the loss of the tourism revenue the island currently generates as well as a loss of habitat for its thriving bird population.
The president, however, said Alcatraz’s return to use as a prison would “serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”
His critics fired back that the idea would be an expensive boondoggle:
This just really sounds like how he’d run his business. Also, he now wants tariffs on all incoming films. This is about as insane as it gets. “Trump threatens a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, saying the movie industry in the US is dying.”
President Donald Trump is opening a new salvo in his tariff war, targeting films made outside the U.S.
In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, complaining that other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw” filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
The White House said Monday that it was figuring out how to comply with the president’s wishes.
“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.
It’s common for both large and small films to include production in the U.S. and in other countries. Big-budget movies like the upcoming “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” for instance, are shot around the world.
Philip Bump–writing at WAPO–has an interesting Op-Ed up today. “America’s least American president. Donald Trump isn’t making America great again. He’s making it into something else entirely.”
On Sunday, NBC News aired an interview with Trump in which he expressed ignorance of the black-letter standards of justice established in the country’s founding document.
“The Constitution says every person, citizens and noncitizens, deserve due process,” “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pointed out. So why not bring Abrego García back to the U.S. and use legal avenues to potentially remove him?
“Well,” Trump replied, “I’ll leave that to the lawyers, and I’ll leave that to the attorney general of the United States.”
Welker noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had admitted that even immigrants had due process rights. Trump again downplayed the idea, saying that holding hearings would mean “we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.” This isn’t as big a hurdle as it may sound. In fiscal 2024, there were more than 900,000 immigration hearings completed. So far in fiscal 2025, there have been more than 460,000. More could be cleared if Trump hadn’t moved to fire a number of immigration judges.
Finally, Welker noted that Trump didn’t really have a choice.
“Even given those numbers that you’re talking about,” she asked, “don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
You may recall that, in January, Trump put his hand on a Bible and affirmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that he would “faithfully execute” his role as president and to the best of his “ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But this has never been an oath he has appeared to actually take to heart.
Trump’s dismissiveness of the Constitution has manifested itself in a lot of ways. You may recall his lack of interest in leaving office when he lost the 2020 presidential election. You may be aware that he has readily, if not giddily, accepted personal income from foreign governments while serving as president. He views the law as a cudgel, not a constraint, issuing pardons for various political allies ensnared in criminal activity while directing federal law enforcement to fish for potential criminal charges against those who work against his political power.
At its heart, Trump’s approach to his role is rooted in his parochial sense of patriotism. He didn’t come to the White House after having worked his way up through lower offices, building consensus and working to appeal to a broad range of constituents. He had no appreciation for how legislation is crafted or for the hard work of reaching compromise. Perhaps most importantly, he has never indicated any robust understanding of American history or of the debates and agreements that led to the country’s creation.
In 2011, for example, Trump was asked by Stephen Colbert if he knew what the 13 stripes on the American flag represent. He said he didn’t.
More recently, Trump was asked by ABC News journalist Terry Moran what the Declaration of Independence (a copy of which the president recently had installed in the Oval Office) means to him personally.
“It means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”
It is special to the country, of course, but not because it is a declaration of “love,” much less “unity.” As the name would suggest, it is precisely the opposite.
Trump doesn’t have the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office because he wants its message to serve as a guidepost for his administration. He doesn’t even appear to know its message. He has it there because it is A Famous American Thing, another decoration in the newly gilded room meant to send a message about his power, not the nation’s.
Dan Froomkin–writing for Press Watch–suggests we need to keep track of all Trump’s oddities. “We need a way to aggregate what Donald Trump is doing to this country.”
News organizations, along with good-government groups and other interested parties, are doing a commendable job of chronicling the damage the Trump regime is doing to the government, the country, and the world.
But none of them, individually, is in a position to give the public the full picture. It’s just too much.
This is a feature of Trump’s strategy of “flooding the zone.” No one entity can possibly keep up.
And as we go forward, how can any one organization keep tabs on all the fallout? It’s not possible.
What we need is a central repository of information so that the full extent of the damage can be found in one place and assessed by the public — and so that there’s a comprehensive record of what needs to be fixed and restored when the time comes to do so. (Sort of like a truth commission, but in real time.)
To aggregate all the existing information, organize it, and collect new data, we need a place, a process, and people.
It makes sense to me since Trump seems to want to undocument more than just people. Who knows how many things Doge has destroyed in the wake of having all-access to every government database and more. He’s disappearing people, children, scientific research, due process, and entire agencies and programs.
This is a site that I was just sent to by a Blue Sky Link. This DNYUZ link has an article by the NYT’s by Jack Goldsmith of Lawfare fame and Harvard Law School. This has been an issue for many people in modern times, with both parties playing the role of enablers. “It’s Not Just Trump. The Presidency Has Become Too Powerful.” So, I need to put this example of both siderisms into perspective. “Mr. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, is an author, with Bob Bauer, of a newsletter about presidential and executive power.”
Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball second term has revealed the full latent power of the presidency. His administration has done this most clearly in its comprehensive elimination of legal and norm-based checks inside the executive branch, its systematic disrespect of judicial process, its extortionate abuse of government power to crush foes and its destructive rhetoric and nastiness.
Yet it is important to recognize that many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on the excesses of recent presidencies. The overall pattern of presidential action over the past few decades reveals an escalation of power grabs that put the country on a terrible course even before Mr. Trump took office again.
The presidency needs reform, and Americans must consider ways — however implausible they may seem in the context of today’s politics — to get there.
Expansionist presidential acts go all the way back to George Washington, who invited charges of monarchism with his use of the Constitution’s broad yet undefined “executive Power.” From there the presidency, with its loose design, grew and grew, with major surges during the Civil War and New Deal era. That trend continued through the 20th century, aided by the rise of mass communication, substantial delegations of power from Congress and an approving Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump’s radical second presidency is, to an underappreciated extent, operating from a playbook devised by his modern predecessors.
His use of emergency powers to impose broad tariffs is similar to a move made in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. His claims of untouchable national security authority echo arguments made after the Sept. 11 attacks by the George W. Bush administration, in which I served.
Presidents for decades have issued pardons as political or personal favors or to avoid personal legal jeopardy. Mr. Trump took this practice to new extremes in his first term, and then President Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned his son and family as well as members of his administration and Congress, in a similar pattern. Mr. Trump in his second term has already issued many self-serving pardons.
Mr. Trump’s executive-order program is an heir of the strategy used by President Barack Obama for large-scale and sometimes legally dubious policy initiatives, including some (involving immigration) where Mr. Obama had earlier admitted he lacked authority to act. Mr. Biden also confessed a lack of power but then acted unilaterally in seeking to forgive student loans.
Mr. Trump has disregarded statutory restrictions to fire officials in independent agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. But in 2021, Mr. Biden extended the Supreme Court’s unitary executive case law to fire the statutorily protected commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Mr. Biden was “the first unitary executive,” noted the legal writer Mark Joseph Stern in 2021.
Mr. Biden also purged the executive branch of Trump holdover officials who were not protected by statute, including members of arts and honorary institutions, the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. The Biden administration’s defense of these firings resulted in judicial precedents that Mr. Trump is now wielding to clean house on a broader scale.
The Trump administration has also built on past presidencies in not enforcing federal law — for example, in letting TikTok live on despite a congressional ban. This practice finds its modern roots in the Obama administration, which asserted broad nonenforcement discretion in high-profile cases involving immigration, marijuana and Obamacare, in effect changing the meaning of those laws.
Something similar has happened with spending. As one recent paper noted, “The past several presidents have all taken significant unilateral actions intruding on Congress’s control over federal spending.” The Trump 2.0 version greatly enlarges this unilateralist pattern.
There are a lot of examples here, and it’s worth thinking about. The Unitary Executive Theory has been around for a while, and since the Reagan years, it has picked up steam in the Supreme Court. Here is a recent article from Democracy Docket explaining the theory and relating to it to Yam Tits. The analysis is written by Jacob Knutsen. “What Is Unitary Executive Theory? How is Trump Using It to Push His Agenda?”
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has executed a whirlwind of dismissals across the federal government that violated federal statutes and decreed numerous executive orders, including one that blatantly defied the plain language of the Constitution.
Behind the seemingly scatter-shot opening acts of his second administration, legal analysts see a common goal: to test a once-fringe legal theory which asserts that the president has unlimited power to control the actions of the four million people who make up the executive branch.
If courts — specifically the Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court — uphold arguments based on the so-called “unitary executive theory,” it would give Trump and subsequent presidents unprecedented power to remove and replace any federal employee and impose their will on every decision in every agency.
Rulings in favor of the Trump administration would also further jeopardize the independence of key regulatory agencies that are susceptible to conflicts of interest and political interference, like the Federal Election Commission, which oversees federal elections and campaign finance laws.
Trump and his administration have furthered the theory by repeatedly invoking Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president, to justify the recent dismissals of federal officials. They have framed the article as allowing the president to use the whole of the executive branch for his political ends.
For example, the White House Feb. 18 invoked the article to rationalize an executive order signed that same day that asserted the president’s authority over almost all regulatory agencies that were created by Congress to act independently, or semi-independently, from the president.
Frank Bowman, a scholar of constitutional and criminal law at the University of Missouri School of Law, told Democracy Docket he believes the executive order is a step toward “an open declaration of dictatorship.”
“In essence, what he’s saying is, ‘I am the law. My will is the law. My view of what the law is the only view that can ever be expressed,’” Bowman said.
I think this take on executive power is one we should get more familiar with since it’s really taken a powerful rise. The Center for American Progress features an analysis in its series on Project 2025. This one was written back in October.”Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency. Far-right extremists have a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights.” It is an imperative read. Trump knows that he can be both pope and king.
Project 2025 takes an absolutist view of presidential authority
To wholly reshape government in ways that most Americans would think is impossible, the Project 2025 blueprint anchors itself in the “unitary executive theory.”22 This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI. The unitary executive theory is designed to sharply diminish Congress’ imperative role to act as a check and balance on the executive branch with tools such as setting up independent agencies to make expert decisions and by limiting presidents’ ability to fire career civil servants for purely political purposes.
The road map to autocracy presented in Project 2025 extends far beyond the unitary executive theory first promoted by President Ronald Reagan, and later espoused by Vice President Dick Cheney, largely designed to implement a deregulatory, corporatist agenda.23 Instead, as discussed further below, Project 2025 presents a maximalist version that does not nibble around the edges but aims to thoroughly demolish the traditional guardrails that allow Congress an equal say in how democracy functions or what policies are implemented. One noted expert at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Philip Wallach, said, “Some of these visions … start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the [sic] government we live under.”24
If Congress is robbed of its imperative role as a check and balance on a president’s power, and the judicial branch is willing to bestow a president with almost unlimited authority, autocracy results. And presidents become strongman rulers—free to choose which laws to enforce, which long-standing norms to jettison, and how to impose their will on every executive branch department and agency.
Well, all these pithy reads should keep you busy for the day. I hope your week goes well. I’ve got 2 doctors’ appointments, but gladly no more procedures. And I’d like just to add if they come for professors, that I’d rather be in the gulag that holds the country’s political cartoonists. To think, I used to just use wonderful paintings.
Happy Cinco de Mayo to all the wonderful folks of Mexican descent and to those of us who just enjoy the holiday!
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?
Wednesday Reads: The Sad Spectacle of the Hegseth Confirmation Hearing
Posted: January 15, 2025 Filed under: Republican politics, U.S. Politics 5 CommentsGood Morning!!
Pete Hegseth
As usual lately, I hardly know how to begin discussing what’s happening in politics news. It’s all insane.
The Senate is now holding confirmation hearings for Trump’s cabinet picks, most of whom are utterly unsuited for their prospective positions.
Yesterday we heard from Pete Hegseth, nominee for defense secretary. Hegseth is an active alcoholic, a notorious abuser of women, and has zero qualifications for the job. And he was only questioned for four hours! He avoided answering most questions, and the ones he did try to answer, he got wrong. Yesterday, his most prominent adversary, Jody Ernst of Iowa, gave up the ghost and agreed to vote for him because of Trump’s threats to primary her. That means Hegseth will most likely be confirmed.
Right now, the hearing for Pam Bondi, who is nominated for Attorney General is under way. NBC News is running live updates. Other upcoming hearings:
What to expect in the Senate
— Several of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks are facing questions today from senators during confirmation hearings, including former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, his pick to lead the Justice Department.
— Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Trump’s choice for secretary of state, will appear in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rubio, a three-term senator with foreign policy experience, is likely to get a friendly reception from his Senate colleagues.
— The other hearings today are for former National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe (for CIA director); Russell Vought (for Office of Management and Budget director); former Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., (for transportation secretary); and oil executive Chris Wright (for energy secretary).
— Today’s proceedings follow yesterday’s tense confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s embattled defense secretary pick.
Josh Marshall notes that it’s important to understand that Democrats have absolutely no control over the results of the confirmation hearings: Thinking About the Confirmations.
There are a few things that are critical to understanding the Trump Cabinet nominations and how Senate Democrats should approach them. The first and most important is that in the case of every nomination the question is entirely up to Republicans. Republicans have a three-seat majority. They have the vote of the Vice President in a tie. What happens or doesn’t happen is entirely a matter decided within the Republican caucus. It is totally out of Democrats’ control. What follows from that is that everything Democrats do, inside the hearing room or outside, is simply and solely a matter of raising the stakes of decisions Republicans make and raising those stakes for the next election. The aim isn’t for any Democratic senator to try to claw their way through the steel wall of Republican loyalty to Donald Trump. It’s to do everything they can to illustrate that Donald Trump staffs his administration with unqualified and/or dangerous toadies and that Senate Republicans are fine with this because they put loyalty to Trump over loyalty to country.
Despite press criticisms of the Democrats, they simply cannot prevent these horrible people from being confirmed. All they can do is put their concerns on the record.
On the Hegseth hearing, I hope you’ll watch this excellent rant by Tim Miller of The Bulwark, who rips Hegseth and the Republicans to shreds.
More commentary on Hegseth:
The New York Times: Joni Ernst Says She Will Vote to Confirm Pete Hegseth
Her decision dramatically increases the likelihood that Mr. Hegseth will have enough votes to be confirmed by the Senate. Because Democrats are expected to oppose him en masse, Mr. Hegseth can afford to lose no more than three Republican votes. After Ms. Ernst’s announcement, only a handful of G.O.P. senators’ votes may be in play; Senators Susan Collins of Maine, John Curtis of Utah, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Todd Young of Indiana have not yet said how they will vote.
Ms. Ernst was seen as a potentially pivotal swing vote for Mr. Hegseth, whose candidacy has been complicated by allegations of sexual assault, public drunkenness and corporate mismanagement. Ms. Ernst, a survivor of sexual assault and the Senate’s first female combat veteran, has actively campaigned for expanding opportunities for female service members and was a leading G.O.P. voice agitating for changes to how the military handles sexual assault cases….
When Mr. Trump announced Mr. Hegseth as his choice, Ms. Ernst initially appeared hostile to the selection, telling reporters that he would “have his work cut out for him.” After a private meeting with Mr. Hegseth, she said on Fox News that she was not yet a “yes” on his confirmation.
Her confession prompted an immediate backlash from outside groups affiliated with Mr. Trump, who targeted her with ads and social media posts, while prominent Iowa Republicans threatened to mount primary challenges against her in 2026.
Within days, Ms. Ernst met with Mr. Hegseth again, and announced that she had been heartened by his promises to audit the Pentagon and appoint a senior official to deter sexual assaults in the military and ensure that female service members would be considered for combat roles if they could meet the requirements.
Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare: The Cult of Unqualified Authenticity. On Pete Hegseth and the first hearing for a Trump nominee for a major cabinet position.
No, you didn’t miss an inauguration. But the Senate Armed Services Committee held the first hearing for a Trump nominee for a major cabinet position. And that hearing made clear that the Trump era has begun anew.
Fox News host Pete Hegseth appeared before the committee to answer questions about his nomination to run the Department of Defense. And with his appearance, a not-so-subtle change took place in the terms of reference of America’s national security discussion.
The words “Russia” and “Ukraine” barely came up today. The words “China” and “Taiwan” made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed.
By contrast, the words “lethality,” “woke,” and “DEI” came up repeatedly. The nominee sparred with members of the committee over the difference between “equality” and “equity.” And he made clear that he aspires to lead the strongest most effective fighting force in the world—with all the macho bluster such a thing might imply—but gave only the most limited sense of where and when he thinks such a military might actually have a role to play.
Hegseth basically admitted that he’s unqualified.
Hegseth is not a stupid man. He is well-spoken, articulate, knowledgeable about a certain range of issues. And I don’t mean at all to disparage his background as a soldier and officer. There is no doubt he is qualified for some sort of defense policy position. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) at one point suggested that he would support Hegseth as a spokesperson for the Pentagon, stating, “I don’t dispute your communication skills.”
But Hegseth also conceded up front that his background is far from a conventional one for a secretary of defense. He has never held a policy role, for example. He has never run anything larger than a company of 200 soldiers. He has never been elected to anything.
So the first question his nomination raises is whether the normal criteria our system has traditionally used to evaluate what an institution like the Pentagon needs in its management has been not just off, but wildly so.
That was the position Hegseth took in his opening statement and that some of the Republican senators took up. “It is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years,” the nominee said. “But, as President Trump also told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’ . . . and where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”
This is actually a radical position—and very Trumpy. The closest analogy to it I can drum up is that it’s like an extreme version of saying that because the leadership of a giant worldwide corporation like Toyota or Samsung or Amazon has under-performed, the board should appoint someone to run the whole organization who had once managed a small corner of a single factory.
If, that is, that person also had an alleged history of showing up drunk to work, sexually assaulting women and mistreating female colleagues, and didn’t believe women should be allowed to work on the factory floor at all.
Read the rest at Lawfare.
Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian: The Greatest DEI Disaster Ever.
Watching Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth demonstrate his appalling lack of credentials, knowledge, and character for the job for which he was nominated I am compelled to ask: Is the Trump administration running a DEI program for incompetent, unqualified, and/or ethically compromised Whites?
Considering Hegseth, election denier Attorney General Pam Bondi, WWE exec Linda McMahon for secretary of education, and vaccine denier, brain-worm victim Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services, one must conclude Republicans are not sending us their best. (Or, the more alarming alternative…they are sending their best.)
If it were not so deadly serious and discouraging, the Hegseth hearing would have been a form of high comedy. Consider this exchange with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.):
Or this, with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.):
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s entire line of questioning was devastating:
Moreover, “Senate Democrats on Monday said that an F.B.I. background check on Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, omitted key details on major allegations against him, in part because it did not include interviews with critical witnesses,” the New York Times reported. “One missed opportunity came when the bureau did not interview one of Mr. Hegseth’s ex-wives before its findings were presented to senators last week, according to people familiar with the bureau’s investigation.” Missed? Or intentionally skipped? It’s unfathomable that such a critical witness would have simply been overlooked.
It is no coincidence that these Democratic women on the committee, including Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and of course Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) showed themselves infinitely more qualified to head the Pentagon. And yet, a man with a history of drinking, a list of financial and sexual scandals (which he denies or claims were merely “anonymous smears”), who possesses absolutely no strategic or diplomatic expertise is president-elect Donald Trump’s choice. While MAGA Republicans (including Hegseth) have genuflected at the altar of “meritocracy”—casting aspersions on women and non-Whites in positions of authority in the military, the Los Angeles fire department, and the Supreme Court—they suspend all critical evaluation of TV hosts, tech bros, and billionaires. The latter they presume qualified.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post: Pete Hegseth seems open to ordering soldiers to shoot protesters.
The timing was generally understood to be a reflection of Trump’s disinterest in upending his Cabinet before the election took place. But his frustrations with Esper were already well-established, centering on Esper’s response to racial justice protests that unfolded earlier in the year.
Esper had publicly rejected the idea of dispatching active-duty troops to tamp down on violence and vandalism that occasionally spun out from the protests. He would later reveal that Trump had asked whether law enforcement or the National Guard confronting protesters could “shoot them in the legs or something.” [….]
When Trump returns to the White House next week, he will obviously not be joined by Esper. Instead, should the Senate choose to confirm, he will be joined by former Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Which means that he may be bringing with him a defense secretary who has declined to rule out ordering members of the military to shoot American protesters.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) introduced the subject during her time questioning the potential secretary.
“In June of 2020, then-President Trump directed former secretary of defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with,” Hirono said. “Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?”
“Senator, I was in the Washington, D.C., National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events,” Hegseth replied, “carrying a riot shield on behalf of my country.”
Here, Hegseth is referring to a period in mid-2020 when protesters were occupying Lafayette Square just north of the White House. At one point, the president’s security detail was sufficiently worried about the protesters that he was removed to a high-security bunker within the executive mansion. Hegseth was a member of the National Guard in 2020, though he resigned after he was identified as a potential “insider threat” and barred from serving during Joe Biden’s inauguration.
As Hegseth was describing his experience, Hirono pressed the point: “Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs as directed to Secretary Esper?”
“I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fence,” Hegseth continued, “set a church on fire and destroy a statue. Chaos.”
“That sounds to me that you will comply with such an order,” Hirono concluded. “You will shoot protesters in the leg.”
Hegseth didn’t reject her conclusion.
Pete Hegseth’s inability to answer basic geopolitical questions left Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) “flabbergasted,” she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday evening.
This came after a tense confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Hegseth, the embattled nominee for President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of Defense, was asked by Duckworth to name how many countries are in the Alliance of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. He proceeded to name three countries that aren’t in the alliance.
“All right,” said Blitzer. “So we just heard that exchange. You had that little exchange you had with Hegseth. Were you surprised he wasn’t able to answer your question?”
“I’m flabbergasted that he was not able to answer a very simple question, and that especially since he actually mentioned the importance of the Indo-Pacific in his opening statement,” said Duckworth, herself a disabled veteran and the only senator of southeast Asian descent.
“But, you know, he also couldn’t tell me what are some of the ways that a secretary of Defense would lead international negotiations with our allies, either,” she added. “So, I mean, some very basic things that anybody who wants to be Secretary of Defense should be able to answer. And for him to not even know a single nation out of the 10 in ASEAN speaks very loudly to his lack of qualifications for the job.”
Tammy Duckworth interrogates Hegseth.
Garrett Graff at Doomsday Scenario: The FBI background check on Pete Hegseth is a whitewash—and that’s on purpose!
As defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth faces questioning today in for his confirmation hearing — the first of the high-profile Trump nominees to do so — he already promised senators this morning, “I sit before you an open book.” That appears to be decidedly untrue. In fact, to the contrary, there’s controversy about how the FBI background check prepared for the US Senate failed to interview Hegseth’s ex-wives or the woman who filed a police report alleging he sexually assaulted here in 2017.
On the surface, that’s insane.
This is a nominee to one of the most important roles in the entire US government who not only faces credible sexual assault allegations, but who apparently also mismanaged, misled, and left ignominiously the only (very low-stakes and small) organization he’s ever actually led. His drinking is such a problem that it worried his colleague at a morning TV show, a far less sensitive and responsible position than he’s currently being considered for, and he’s already had to promise he’d stop consuming alcohol to lead the Pentagon to reassure senators.
His already-thin credentials around the military raise worrying questions too: He’s defended war criminals and been reported for extremism by his peers in the National Guard because he has a tattoo usually associated with white nationalists. This is a man that the National Guard apparently didn’t trust to be one of thousands defending the US Capitol after January 6th who may, in a matter of days or weeks, be in charge of the entire military. This is someone whose own ties to Christian white nationalists places him outside the mainstream of even that already-extreme movement. And that’s before you even get to his apparently long-standing beliefs about how women and minorities don’t have a place in today’s military.
You’d think this is precisely the type of person the FBI should do the most thorough background check on ever imagined. And you’d be right.
The fact that the so-called “FBI background check” for the man slated to head the Pentagon, the $800 billion defense budget, and the nation’s three-million-personnel military failed to talk to the very people you’d expect an investigator to be most interested in speaking with is not a mistake.
But it’s actually not the FBI’s fault.
In fact, that willful ignorance by design — and it bodes ill for how the incoming Trump administration is looking at the biggest threats to its nominees.
Read more about FBI background checks at the link. Garrett Graff is an expert on the FBI.
One more very honest opinion on Pete Hegseth from Rick Wilson: The America Psycho and the Pentagon.
Imagine a country perched on the edge of a political cliff, trembling in the shadow of an authoritarian leader. Elected officials, business elites, and even everyday citizens know they’re dealing with a dangerous man who does not respect democratic norms, the rule of law, or basic human decency.
He wants others like him by his side—deficient, broken people—the cruel, sadistic, ugly, and jealous. He wants this broken soul reflected in the distorted, dirty glass of the mirrors held aloft by his minions. He wants men whose character is a slurry of greed, lust, avarice, and weaknesses.
Christian Bale in American Psycho
Donald Trump is that authoritarian, and Pete Hegseth is the modern-day American Psycho Trump wants in charge of the Defense Department.
Hegseth sat there Tuesday like an oleaginous and smarmy Patrick Bateman cosplayer. His 1980s American Psycho affect reeked of insincerity, abundant hair product, and the smug satisfaction that Republicans work for Trump, not for their constituents or, God forbid, the nation.
In the end, Tuesday’s hearings weren’t about Pete Hegseth, at least to the Republican Majority in the Senate.
No, these hearings into the deficient character, low intellect, and abusive nature of Pete Hegseth were overshadowed by the rancid stench of fear, the raw terror at defying Trump — even if it means protecting the nation from incompetence and intemperance — means a drunk, serial adulterer, a fraud and a failure at managing tiny organizations will be placed at the helm of the largest operation in the world. It will mean a man who paid off a victim of sexual assault to silence her is treated as if he’s a serious and qualified candidate to run the Department of Defense.
It means a man who thinks “working out with the troops” is a substitute for knowledge, experience, and judgment. It means they’re blindly placing the lives of 3 million men and women in uniform and out who serve the Department of Defense — and a considerable amount of our national treasure and reputation — in the hands of an obsessively groomed talk show host.
It means placing a man who will run out any general officer who fails to kowtow to Trump, and who believes the talismanic utterance of “woke” is the root solution to the meaningful problems we face around the globe. His few “substantive” answers were a gossamer scrim of “I read the headlines in Defense Daily this morning, but I skipped the hard words” superficiality.
I wish I could tell you they don’t know what they’re doing.
They most certainly do.
They see the warning signs, the flashing red lights of Hegseth’s coming failures and the enormous costs it will impose on our nation.
And yet, their response is chilling in its predictability: they freeze, they cower, and most damningly, they comply with Trump. In their fear, they pave the very road to disaster. A few think they’re playing the monster when it’s just the monster waiting to devour them last.
It’s going to be really awful, folks.
That’s my report on the Hegseth hearing. I guess I’ll see what’s happening with Pam Bondi. Take care everyone.
Mostly Monday Reads: Seven days to Hell
Posted: January 13, 2025 Filed under: Elon Musk, FARTUS, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: FARTUS, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, mass deportations, Pete Hegseth weirdo sexual assaulter, US Military on US streets 5 Comments
Odorific John (repeat1968) Buss
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
If there ever was a day to step away from the news, this is it. There was a headline in Raw Story yesterday by Alternet’s Maya Boddie that explains the panic-inducing headlines I’m seeing today. “‘People are scared’: Trump ‘leaning heavily’ on this tactic to complete his first priority.” The talk of having the military turned on our citizens and concentration camps for people deemed illegal has my stomach churning, frankly. Do we have to carry our birth certificates around with us until FARTUS determines a different manner of identifying citizens other than through birthright citizenship as outlined in our Constitution? When do those of us who actively write about him and his policies and protest his actions get the ticket to those same camps? What happens to the GLBTQ+ community? And why do I sound like I’m teaching a history class on Germany in the 1930s?
Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection, he made his plan to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.
Three sources familiar with the president-elect’s plans recently spoke with Rolling Stone senior political reporter Aswan Suesaeng about the MAGA administration’s strategy to implement the operation.
Per Suesaeng’s report, Trump “and several of his key lieutenants are aware that their desired, larger-scale crackdowns — which could involve a new network of militarized ‘camps‘ — will take significant time to execute.”
Therefore, “In the meantime, Trump and his incoming anti-immigration crew have plans to fill the gaps in part by leaning heavily into generating relentless propaganda and (as one Trump transition official puts it) ‘media spectacle’ that many of them hope will cause undocumented immigrants to flee the country and persuade migrants not to come to America,” Suesaeng reports.
“People are really scared,” immigration attorney Katie Kersh told the publication. Having run legal clinics for Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio last year, Kersh added, “I think a lot of the Haitians are concerned that their rights will be violated. We are right now trying to make sure that people understand their rights, and allay their fears that they’ll be on a plane back to Haiti on Jan. 21, which is not how the law works.”
Suesaeng reports, “According to the three sources, there have been recent internal discussions within Trump’s government-in-waiting, including with the president-elect himself, not only about launching high-profile, big-city raids at the very beginning of the second term — but about how to inject those raids into the media ecosystem and social-media bloodstream as aggressively as possible.”
This, the politics reporter adds, would involve “tipping off friendly media, such as Fox News, to generate news footage of the actions; sending along the administration’s own camera crews; coordinating with, and pumping out video, photos, and announcements to top influencers on popular social media sites; having billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk wield his X platform (formerly Twitter) to whip up a MAGAfied propaganda loop highlighting these law-enforcement operations; and, of course, letting Trump boast garrulously on TV and online about these operations.”
This is from Politico. “‘I Think Things Are Going to Be Bad, Really Bad’: The US Military Debates Possible Deployment on US Soil Under Trump. Trump has said he wants to use active-duty U.S. troops to quell protests and round up immigrants. Will the military comply?” The last time this happened was when Poppy Bush sent the military to LA during the protests and riots after the Rodney King beatings.
According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
On Nov. 18, two weeks after the election, Trump confirmed he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military for the mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
One fear is that domestic deployment of active-duty troops could lead to bloodshed given that the regular military is mainly trained to shoot at and kill foreign enemies. The only way to prevent that is establishing clear “rules of engagement” for domestic deployments that outline how much force troops can use — especially considering constitutional restraints protecting U.S. citizens and residents — against what kinds of people in what kinds of situations. And establishing those new rules would require a lot more training, in the view of many in the military community.
“Everything I hear is that our training is in the shitter,” says retired Army Lt. Gen. Marvin Covault, who commanded the 7th Infantry Division in 1992 in what was called “Joint Task Force LA.” “I’m not sure we have the kind of discipline now, and at every leader level, that we had 32 years ago. That concerns me about the people you’re going to put on the ground.”
In an interview, Covault said he was careful to avoid lethal force in Los Angeles by emphasizing to his soldiers they were now “deployed in the civilian world.” He ordered gun chambers to remain empty except in self-defense, banned all automatic weapons and required bayonets to remain on soldiers’ belts.
But Covault added that he set those rules at his own discretion. Even then Covault said he faced some recalcitrance, especially from U.S. Marine battalions under his command that sought to keep M16 machine guns on their armored personnel carriers. In one reported case a Marine unit, asked by L.A. police for “cover,” misunderstood the police term for “standing by” and fired some 200 rounds at a house occupied by a family. Fortunately, no one was injured.
“If we get fast and loose with rules of engagement or if we get into operations without a stated mission and intent, we’re going to be headline news, and it’s not going to be good,” Covault said in the interview.
The military patrols in front of my house after Hurricane Katrina: Hummers, guns, and soldiers
I remember when I first got back to New Orleans after Katrina and was met by an up-armored Humvee with a gun turret and a few guys popping their rifles at me. I smiled, lifted my coffee cup to them, and my dogs wagged their tale, but, wow, I was glad that acting Lt. General Russel L. Honoré had yelled, “Weapons down! Weapons down, damn it!” at the NOPD and the surrounding National Guards. I’m not sure I’d wish that experience on anyone. However, what I witnessed as the National Guard stayed and started coming to our locals and accompanied the police to crime scenes was that they kept the police in line. What FARTUS is suggesting seems to go against the Constitution.
Ever so often, the media drags out some political has-been and gets their opinion. The Guardian has this to say about what Newt Gingrich says about the deportation efforts. Remember, Chamber of Commerce Republicans love them some cheap and plentiful labor. “Trump’s deportation vows only for ‘rabid’ Republicans and will fail, says Newt Gingrich. Former US House speaker says documented people, Dreamers, mothers and children must not be deported‘They enrich our lives’: Newt Gingrich on immigrants and Trump’s mass deportation plan
Newt Gingrich, the former US House speaker and presidential hopeful, said a section of his own Republican party was “rabid” over immigration and predicted Donald Trump’s suggestion that he could deport documented people as well as millions of undocumented people will not come to pass.
“I’d be very surprised if you see any significant effort to change the game for people who are here legally,” Gingrich said, weeks before Trump’s return to the White House. “I just think there’s a very small faction of the party that’s rabid about this.”
He also warned that public support for mass deportations would “collapse” if stories began to come out “about mothers or babies or children being deported”.
The president-elect may not welcome Gingrich’s intervention. After all, Trump won last year’s election promising mass deportations involving the armed forces and detention camps. He has chosen ultra-hardliners including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller and has suggested his administration will attempt to remove children and documented people, telling NBC: “I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”
Also at issue is the fate of millions of so-called Dreamers, undocumented people who were children when they were brought to the US, and Trump’s vow to remove birthright citizenship, a right protected by the 14th amendment but which Trump says he will strike down by executive order.
Amid widespread predictions of chaos and protest, Gingrich said he was “passionately in favor of trying to help find a path to create legality for the Dreamers”, a position that may put him less at odds with Trump, given Trump’s suggestion he might accept a deal on the matter.
Gingrich continued: “It’s nonsense to say somebody who came here when they were two, only speaks English, graduated as a high school valedictorian and is currently a nurse or a doctor should be deported. We’re going to deport them and they don’t speak the language of whatever country their parents came from, and they’ve earned the right to be Americans?
“ … I think [the Trump administration has to] to realize that there are gradations here that we’re dealing with, and try to think through, how do you both meet the long-term identity and national security interests of the country and meet the human concerns. And I think it’s a real challenge.”
There’s already some discussion about the HB-1 VISAs supported by Trump’s buddy, the equally vile Elon Musk, who, by Trump’s standards, should be in line to be deported, Bannon has picked a fight with him over the issue, and it’s as bugfuck ugly as the two of them are physically. This is from The New Republic. “Bannon’s Rage at Musk Suddenly Goes Nuclear as MAGA Meltdown Worsens. As the war between Steve Bannon and Elon Musk intensifies, a leading Never Trump writer explains what all this says about the horrors that Trump-MAGA have in store for us—and how Dems can fight back.”
Over the weekend, Steve Bannon’s fury at Elon Musk truly went off the rails. Bannon, who has been feuding with Musk over immigration, vowed that he will run Musk out of the MAGA movement by Inauguration Day, suggesting this battle will continue once Donald Trump is in office. This battle exposes major divisions in the MAGA movement—yet Democrats aren’t really trying to exploit them. Why not? We talked to Mona Charen, a columnist at The Bulwark, who has a good new piece arguing that Democrats need to find their footing as a loyal opposition. She explains what the feud says about Trump, the MAGA movement, and the rise of global authoritarianism and fascism—and how Democrats can rise to the moment. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
Sargent: Steve Bannon gave this interview to an Italian newspaper in which he said, “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day. He will not have a pass to the White House…. He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy.” Bannon even says it’s his personal vendetta to take this guy down. Before we get into the guts of this dispute, what do you think of this, Mona?
Charen: It’s interesting because I published a piece that you were kind enough to mention last week where I was asking: Where are the Democrats who are calling upon Trump and others in the Republican Party to denounce Musk for his open promotion of basically reactionary movements in Europe, even fascist movements and other crimes and misdemeanors? And they’ve been oddly quiescent. Then, of all people, Steve Bannon comes out and he’s going out at it hammer and tongs. He’s accusing him of also racism, which I didn’t see coming. I don’t know, did you imagine that you were going to see Steve Bannon decrying the white South Africans and their influence on the MAGA movement? That was interesting too.
Sargent: Just to clarify for listeners, that is something else that Bannon said in this interview. He decried the white South Africans, [saying] they’re real racists. Why are we letting the worst racists in human history, or something like that,dictate policy in the United States? Let’s talk a little bit about the real root of the feud between Musk and Bannon. Musk wants more high-skilled visas for tech workers, and Bannon, along with Stephen Miller, oppose this. They see big tech as part of a globalist plot to replace American workers, etc.
I do not know how so many privileged old white men can be so outraged about everything. All this is going on as Pete Hegseth’s hearings happen tomorrow. This is from the falling apart at the seams Washington Post. “Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Pentagon pick, faces tough confirmation test. The controversial former Fox News host has been accused of sexual assault and faces a grueling confirmation hearing on the path to becoming the next secretary of defense.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will appear for questioning Tuesday on Capitol Hill, in a public confirmationhearing that Democrats will use to interrogate his limited management experience, allegations of illicit and inappropriate conduct, and a long history of public commentary deriding women, minorities and people with opposing political views.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host, who has called for a “full counterattack” to retake America’s military from “radical leftists” and Democrats, will be the first of Trump’s unconventional cabinet picks to submit to formal scrutiny before a bipartisan panel of senators.
Hegseth’s path to winningthe job depends in large part on how he weathers the blistering questions he will face this week, with little hope of securing any Democratic votes andas several moderate Republicans have expressed concerns about his appointment.
As the secretary of defense, one of the senior-most positions in Trump’s incoming cabinet, Hegseth, a 44-year-old National Guard veteran who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, would oversee more than 3 million military and civilian personnel around the world, the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal, and an annual budget of more than $800 billion.
This is Rebecca Traister’s take on the New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. ” Pete Hegseth Is a Test Inside the Senate’s torturous debates over Donald Trump’s worst Cabinet nominee.”
Pete Hegseth is, by every measure, an abysmal nominee to run the American military. The Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News commentator has no experience managing enormous, complex organizations like the Pentagon and would, as secretary of Defense, be in charge of an $850 billion budget and 3 million active-duty and civilian personnel. His spotty professional record includes having been asked to step down from two nonprofit veterans’ groups whose budgets he reportedly ran into the ground. Questions about his personal behavior abound: He has been accused of rape (he reached a civil settlement with his accuser in 2017) and has a reported habit of excessive drinking, including while on the job and to the point of incapacitation in public. He has defended waterboarding and torture, advocated on behalf of alleged war criminals, and as recently as November he declared, “I’m straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles.” Even Republicans haven’t been able to find much good to say about him. “If it were a secret ballot,” one moderate senator told me, “I don’t think he’d be confirmed.”
But the battle for his confirmation will not be secret; it will be glaringly public, with televised hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee scheduled for Tuesday. It is the first serious test of Donald Trump’s newly invigorated strongman model of governance and of whether he can continue to bend the Republican Party to his will even as Hegseth breaks procedural precedents, including skirting a vetting process designed to protect national security. It is also a window into the influence that Trump’s heavy, Elon Musk, is exerting across Washington by threatening to bankroll primary challenges of anyone who defies Trump. And Hegseth’s nomination is a measure of just how strenuously Democrats are planning to fight back, at a moment when they are powerless to stop the Republicans in Congress and are second-guessing past resistance efforts that have been retrospectively cast as failures. Trump has singled out Hegseth as the figure he cares most about pushing through, his next administration’s big opening number, showcasing what he hopes will be his own party’s submission to his whims and the Democrats’ humiliating impotence in the face of his authority.
The Armed Services Committee is not one that has historically been the venue for explosive partisan warfare. “The thing to understand about it,” said one staffer, “is that it’s designed to have hearings about defense policy, draft the defense bill every year, and is sort of bipartisan.” But Hegseth is all but certain to cleave the group into partisan camps. His nomination has put an uncomfortable spotlight on Republican senators who might be persuaded to vote against his nomination, especially on Iowa’s Joni Ernst, a staunch Republican who is respected by her Democratic colleagues for her commitment to the committee’s work.
Is this the man you want commanding armed troops on your neighborhood streets if Trump gets his way? Trump has started backtracking on ending the Ukraine Invasion by Russia by giving a lot of it away to Putin. This is from The New Republic. It’s reported by Hafiz Rashid. “Team Trump Suddenly Backtracks on Key Campaign Promise. Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy made a damning confession on the likelihood of the war ending.”
Donald Trump is backtracking on his big campaign promise to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, according to his special envoy to Ukraine.
On Sunday, Keith Kellogg told Fox News that the Russia-Ukraine war would come to a “solvable solution in the near term.”
“You know, I would like to set a goal on a personal level and professional level. I would say, let’s set it at 100 days and move it all the way back and figure a way we can do this in the near term to make sure that the solution is solid, it’s sustainable, and that this war ends,” Kellogg said.
A “near term” timeline is a marked difference from Trump’s bravado on the campaign trail, where he repeatedly bragged that he could end the war in a day or even sooner. Trump himself seems to realize this, telling Time magazine last month that “the Middle East is an easier problem to handle than what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin has also thrown cold water on Trump’s promises, ignoring the president-elect’s “warnings.”
In just 7 days, the clown car returns. We’ve seen a slight shuffle in some of the folks we’ve received news from. Jennifer Ruben announced she’s left WAPO and will be writing at The Contrarian at Substack with Norm Eisen.
Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.
I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.
The decay and compromised principles of corporate and billionaire-owned media underscore the urgent need for alternatives. Americans are eager for innovative and independent journalism that offers lively, unflinching coverage free from cant, conflicts of interest and moral equivocation.
Also, Rachel Maddow returns to her timeslot 5 times a week for FARTUS’ first 100 days, as reported by CNN.
The MSNBC prime time star is expanding her on-air presence for the first 100 days of President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, the network announced Monday, injecting what may be a much-needed ratings boost into the progressive outlet’s lineup.
Maddow’s show, MSNBC’s highest rated program, has only aired once a week since 2022 when she stepped away to focus on other projects, including films, books and podcasts. Her temporary return to the anchor desk weeknights at 9 p.m. ET will see Alex Wagner, who currently anchors the timeslot Tuesday through Friday, deployed on special assignment to cover the impact of the president-elect’s policies.
So, there’s a lot more out there, and you may share it in the comments section. We may have to try to pull your comments out of the pending bin, so be patient.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: What Fresh Hell?
Posted: January 6, 2025 Filed under: 2025 What Fresh Hell?, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, democracy is threatened, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social, Adjuctated Rapist, and Traitor of the United States with total credit given to JJ), FARTUS (Felon, idiocracy, John (repeat1968) Buss, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, Lambert, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Sweet Apocalypse, Toxic Masculinity 10 Comments
“His nose is already growing!” John (repeat1968) Buss
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Today is the anniversary of the shameful January 6th treason and violence. It may seem quiet today, but the worst is yet to come. Not only is our new FARTUS (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor of the United States with total credit given to JJ) about to take the oath of office, but all these other traitors are about to be granted Presidential Pardons. My only solace is that I may eat King Cake now because today is also 12th night, the official start of the Mardi Gras Season.
These are degenerate times. That has a specific meaning in Buddhism. Lama Yeshe describes it like this. “It has five characteristics: short life spans, scarce means of subsistence, mental afflictions, strong wrong views, and weak sentient beings.” That’s a good enough explanation for me when thinking about what’s been going on lately.
I will rely on the columnists I read today because they make sense. Our media legacy has failed us. First up is Amanda Marcotte writing for Salon. I wrote something along these lines on Friday, but Amanda has thought more deeply. “Toxic masculinity links the New Orleans attacker and the Las Vegas bomber. Whether MAGA or ISIS, troubled men are getting sucked in by hateful online propaganda.”
As I noted in passing last week, the striking thing about the life of Shamsud-Din Jabbar is how much it reads like the boilerplate biography of any random Jan. 6 defendant or MAGA-inspired criminal. The 42-year-old who allegedly murdered 15 people at the New Year’s festivities in New Orleans appeared, on paper, to be relatively successful in his career: 8 years in the Army, a degree from Georgia State, and a $125,000 a year job for an accounting firm. But his personal life was a mess. He was thrice divorced in 10 years, and at least two of the divorces were acrimonious and required repeat court interference. His divorce lawyer even fired him. His financial mismanagement meant his healthy salary didn’t go far enough, and he had to be forced to make back payments on child support.
Like so many men facing personal troubles, Jabbar didn’t get the help he needed. Instead, he turned to radicalizing voices online, which led him to believe that he needed to double down on toxic masculinity. It’s a story we hear over and over, from so-called incels who commit mass shootings to Donald Trump fans who attack government buildings to terrorists imbibing ISIS propaganda. Rather than taking responsibility for their personal failures and striving to do better, men of all stripes turn to the internet where they’re greeted by a sea of influencers, ready to tell them that it’s other people — women, people of different races or religions, the “woke mob” — that is to blame. In some cases, as happened here, they go far enough down the rabbit hole that they talk themselves into violence.
Thankfully, no one but the bomber was badly hurt in the Las Vegas suicide bombing that happened the same night as the Bourbon St. attack, but the parallels between Jabbar and Matthew Livelsberger aren’t hard to spot. Like Jabbar, Livelsberger was a troubled man who picked a highly symbolic location, blowing up a Cybertruck in front of a Trump hotel. Both men had checkered romantic histories, and Livelsberger appears to have told multiple people he feared he suffered from PTSD. Like Jabbar, Livelsberger seems to have acted on a belief that he was going out like a hero, standing up for his far-right ideology and using his death to call on fellow MAGA believers to commit acts of terrorism.
“Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary,” he wrote in his final manifesto. He declared the U.S. is “terminally ill and headed toward collapse,” complained that people don’t believe “[m]asculinity is good and men must be leaders” and made tired Twitter jokes calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “DEI candidate” and President Joe Biden “Weekend at Bernie’s.” He concluded, “Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans!”
Livelsberger defensively insisted the bombing “was not a terrorist attack.” This sentiment is belied not just by the violence of the act itself and his calls for MAGA men to use violence because “a hard reset must occur for our country.”
It’s the 12th night, which means the members of Skull and Bones Krewes get up early to remind us of our mortality.
When Cis men fall apart, they can’t just go silently into the night, get help, or do something productive. They have to injure or kill innocents while killing themselves. They destroy more than their own lives. They have to leave some formal Mansplaining document that lets us know why it’s all our fault. These are generally misogynistic, at the very least. Most of them spew more bullshit and bile than the waste from slaughterhouses.
John Pavlovitz wrote this on December 12th in his Substack, The Beautiful Mess. “America Chose the Monster.”
To have cast a vote for him with all that we have seen is to declare war on decency, on equality, on any semblance of forthrightness or goodness. It is to double-down on the bigotry which was dismissed as hyperbole during his campaign but which has already been ratified hundredfold as he assembles his Cabinet picks and broadcasts his agenda.
To witness his absolute disregard for the Constitution, his violent allergic reaction to facts, his complete lack of empathy and to not condemn it all becomes an indictment of one’s own heart. It becomes an act of aggression against humanity.
The are truths that are self-evident in the light of these days:
A viable healthcare alternative is not coming.
Taxes for the middle class are not coming down.
Project 2025 is going to be implemented.
Mexico is still not paying for the wall.
Immigrants are going to being persecuted.
Protections for those with special needs are evaporating.
The poor are getting thrown to the lions.
Public schools are being thrown under the bus.
The elderly are being left to fend for themselves.
The environment is being willfully set on fire.
The economy is going to be compromised.
The whole system is being intentionally blown-up.
The rule of Law in our Government is being trod upon.Aside from the smallest percentage of the wealthiest in this nation, no one is going to be healthier, safer, or more financially secure.
This is a nonpartisan tragedy.
We all do impulsive things when we are terrified, when it’s dark and we’re convinced there’s a monster under the bed. But eventually the light comes on and we have reality at our disposal and we get to choose to see things as they are. I can’t fathom those presently determined to stay in the dark, to pretend they’re not seeing what they’re seeing—when what they’re seeing is a danger to them too.
It’s morning here in America, friends. The brilliant light of day is illuminating every dark corner and exposing every unsavory decision from the night before.
For a myriad of reasons, America chose the monster. It chose the hatred, the fear, the nihilism, the separation. The question of why is too sprawling and nebulous to answer.
And with the coming of this Monster comes more monsters. Former Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone reminds us about the kind of people that will be put back on the street when the mass pardon of traitors begins. This is from HuffPo. “Cowards, Liars And Jan. 6: Former Officer Michael Fanone Speaks Out As Trump’s Return Looms.
“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” says Michael Fanone, who was nearly killed by Trump supporters four years ago.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that he got away with inciting an insurrection as well as defrauding the American people and attempting to subvert democracy,” Fanone told HuffPost during a phone interview just ahead of the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riot.“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” Fanone said. “I believe democracy in this country is dead, and it died when the Supreme Court granted the president of the United States immunity for official acts and then failed to define what the fuck official acts are.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States in July found that as long as something could be shaded as an “official” act, prosecution was off the table.
The ruling obliterated key parts of the criminal indictment brought against Trump in the Jan. 6 case by then-special counsel Jack Smith. And Trump’s victory in November means he’ll likely never face federal charges.
Shortly after the presidential election, Smith dismissed the case without prejudice ― meaning it could theoretically come back to life one day ― but Fanone’s faith in the justice system is already shattered. He called Attorney General Merrick Garland an “absolute coward.”
“Listen, people say I’m naive or I don’t know how these things work, but I was a cop for 20 years. Not only was I a cop, I was a cop in Washington, D.C. Our prosecutors were federal prosecutors. I worked with the [Department of Justice] every single day for 20 years. I know exactly how that institution and organization works. The decision not to pursue an investigation into Trump was all political,” Fanone said. “The investigation should have been launched on Jan. 7, 2021.”
Fanone was Trump-friendly before the J6 Insurrection and voted for him in 2016.
Senator John Thune from South Dakota is the new bad guy in charge of the Senate. We’re already getting some idea of how bad it’s going to be since he appears to be whipping the caucus for the gross number of idiots Trump wants in his cabinet. This is from The Hill. “Thune says it’s unclear whether all Trump Cabinet picks will be confirmed.” Some of the most worrying of them have to deal with National Security.
John Thune on Trump possibly pardoning J6 insurrectionists who assaulted police officers: "That's ultimately gonna be a decision that President Trump is gonna have to make. What I'm focused on is the future."
Thune joined NBC News’s “Meet the Press” for an interview that aired Sunday, as he took the lead of the upper chamber at the start of the 119th Congress.
“What I’ve promised them is a fair process,” Thune said of Trump’s picks. “And so, these nominees are going to go through a committee where they’re going to have to answer questions. There will be some hard questions posed.”
Thune highlighted the desire to provide Trump with the Cabinet he wants but noted that the Senate has a role to “advise and consent,” particularly regarding his national security choices.
“We have a lot of our senators who take that role very seriously,” he said. “And so, we will make sure that these nominees have a process, a fair process, in which they have an opportunity to make their cases not only to the members of the committee and ultimately to the full Senate but also to the American people.”
Thune wouldn’t confirm whether he would vote for or against any of Trump’s nominees, including some particularly controversial choices like Kash Patel to lead the FBI, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth for Department of Defense.
Thune said he’s met with some of Trump’s nominees, and there are “some” that he has been “really, really impressed” by.
This bit popped up over the weekend and is disturbing. This was reported by CBS. “Thune has privately told Trump that Hegseth has the votes to be confirmed as Defense Secretary, sources say.” Thune has so many toxic male issues combined with a lack of experience and knowledge of the job that anyone connected to the military has spoken out against him.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has privately told President-elect Donald Trump that he believes Pete Hegseth will have the votes to be confirmed as Secretary of Defense, according to three sources.
When asked for comment, a spokesman for Thune would only tell CBS News, “Two things we don’t discuss publicly: Whip counts and private conversations with the president.”
The new Senate Majority Leader in an interview with “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” promised a fair process but expressed more caution.
“I think these are nominees who are new enough, they’ve been going around and conducting their meetings, which I think, frankly, have gone very well, but they still have to make their case in front of the committee. And, you know, we don’t know all the information about some of these nominees.”
Hegseth’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Jan. 14, according to Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker.
Just so you know, future FBI Director Kash Patel is still making the rounds in the Senate Building. “Kash Patel Believes the FBI Planned Jan. 6th. His embrace of this wild conspiracy theory should disqualify him from leading the bureau.” This is from The Bulwark.
“WHAT WAS THE FBI DOING PLANNING January 6th for a year?”
Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as FBI director, asked that question during a November 25, 2022 episode of his Kash’s Corner podcast for the Epoch Times. It was no slip of the tongue. As the title of that episode suggested—“What Did the FBI Know Before Jan. 6?”—Patel spent considerable time trying to cast the FBI as a villain responsible for January 6th. Patel noted that FBI Director Christopher Wray had “testified that the FBI never instigated or helped the January 6th protesters commit crimes.” But citing a report that the FBI had confidential human sources in the crowd, Patel asserted: “Okay, well, that was in planning for at least a year.”
Our review of Patel’s public appearances over the past four years reveals that he has repeatedly insinuated or argued that the FBI used its confidential human sources or employees to instigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and entrap Trump’s supporters. Patel has claimed (as in the podcast episode above) that what he calls the “FBI’s Confidential Human Source Corruption Coverup Network” was somehow involved with January 6th. That is not only an insult to the memory of that day; it should be disqualifying for him to helm the bureau.
During the September 30, 2022 episode of Kash’s Corner, for instance, Patel said: “The question that has to be answered is, when did the FBI put those guys in, and where? And did those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so?” Patel claimed that “is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can’t charge someone who’s been entrapped.” And he wondered who “was running this confidential human source network” and reporting it to FBI Director Chris Wray.
Patel added he would “venture a guess” that “once we see the documentation from January 6th, you will see the FBI’s confidential human source corruption coverup network on blast.” And he accused the FBI of inserting these human sources “into these matters.” Patel asked rhetorically: “Why? Why would you say January 6th? Because they wanted a political target, a political prosecution, not one based on law and fact.”
The man who could lead Trump’s FBI has failed to substantiate these wild accusations, which are contradicted by other evidence and by common sense. Regardless, he has frequently advanced this conspiracy theory, using his background as a former federal prosecutor and public defender—key credentials used to buttress his nomination—to provide it with a veneer of credibility.
An extensive amount of documentation is provided in the article. It’s not a fun read.
ProPublica has published another astounding piece of journalism. This is long and shocking. It gets to the heart of Trump’s rabid base. Again, this is the heart of Toxic Masculinity. “The Militia and the MoleOutraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.”
So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chatlogs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.
The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.
Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.
Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.
(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.)
Williams is part of a larger cold war, radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American politics into their own hands.
Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they recognized something in me.”
The last thing I want to post about is the Washington Post. The newspaper is hemorrhaging reporters, and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Political Cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit because Bezos axed her submission. The raw sketch is featured on the right. It’s also begun layoffs. This happens when greedy Tech Bros take over things they know nothing about. This is from Oliver Darcy’s Status. “Paper Cuts. The Washington Post is expected to lay off dozens of staffers this week, Status has learned.”
Layoffs are expected to rock The Washington Post this week, according to people familiar with the matter.
The layoffs are slated to hit the Jeff Bezos-owned and Will Lewis-led newspaper’s business division, I’m told. One person familiar with the matter said that the cuts will be deep, impacting many dozens of employees.
The layoffs will surely deplete morale further inside the beleaguered newspaper, which has suffered a talent exodus over the last several weeks. As I reported earlier, star reporter Josh Dawsey will exit The Post for a job at The Wall Street Journal. His departure comes on the heels of other top staffers fleeing, including Matea Gold, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Charles Lane, Tyler Pager, and Amanda Katz.
A spokesperson for The Post didn’t have an immediate comment. But The Post has been in poor financial shape in recent years, a fact that management has not hidden from employees. Those financial problems were exacerbated when Bezos blocked The Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the November election, a move that led to more than 250,000 readers canceling their subscriptions.
I’ve been a bit on the gratuitous Buddhism-sharing thing today, which I try not to overdo, but this quote from Chamtral Rinpoche hit me hard last night.
The biggest threat to our world are not human beings per se. The biggest threat is each individual person’s level of greed. One extremely greedy person can harm our world more than a million people who practice contentment.
Drinking salt water will never quench your thirst. The more you drink, the thirstier you will become. Likewise, greed will never bring you satisfaction, as it will cause an endless pursuit of material wealth to the detriment of our world and all of the beings who inhabit it.
Always remember that the greedier you are, the more you and others will suffer, and the poorer you will become inside. But the more contentment that you have, the more you and others will benefit, and the richer you will become inside.
We will have to cultivate inner peace to get through all of this. I’ve already cut down on my TV News viewing. I have a mature meditation practice (since the 1970s), so I have that. Of course, the furbabies and the Zoom calls from the Granddaughters put a smile on my face. I’m just trying to stay in the moment. I hope you can find a way to cope with this all. I’ve been listening to a lot of modern classic piano. This piece by Lambert comes from an album called “Sweet Apocalypse.” It’s beautiful and relaxing, and the name is appropriate for the times; it was recorded in 2017 during this first stint of anguish.
Talk to me about how you’re coping with this blast of kleptocracy, kakistocracy, and idiocracy?
What’s on your reading and blogging list?
Monday Reads: I have Questions
Posted: July 15, 2024 Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, Republicans against democracy, right wing hate grouups, Treason and Sedition Republican Style | Tags: Alex Jones, Cannon drops Stolen Docs Case, Corrupting Judges, Ivan Laiklin on the benefits of assassinating Trump, Judge Loose Cannon, Putin staged assassination, republican politics, Trump Staged Assassination? 19 Comments
This drone photo of the vent area in Butler, Pennsylvania, shows the building in the upper left-hand corner where the shooter’s body was found.
Dear Sky Dancers, this is not a good day for our Republic.
Judge Cannon used this moment to distract the press from what I believe might be a staged coup attempt by Donald on Donald. He golfed right after the shooting and had no bandages or marks to be seen. I have reached this theory of the case after spending a day and a half asking questions and reviewing materials with JJ, BB, and a friend of my friend PB from the late Fire Dog Lake site. The press is characterizing people like us as BlueAnon conspiracy theorists. Frankly, I just have questions about things. I’m up to being proved wrong. I’m just someone who has watched decades of Law and Order and Criminal Minds, and I’m also smarter than your average bear.
The Cannon decision was based on the bone she was thrown by corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the shocking presidential immunity case. Human Rights Lawyer Qasim Rashid had this to say today on @Threads.
Understand what Judge Cannon did. She saw the non-stop media coverage of the shooting, used that distraction to overturn decades of legal precedent without citing a single case in her ruling’s favor, & dismissed Trump’s classified documents case. This is how republics collapse.
To be sure, Cannon’s absurd ruling is so extreme that only one of the MAGA justices supported it in his immunity decision (Thomas). Her decision will likely be reversed because it has absolutely zero basis in precedent whatsoever.But Cannon’s indefensible opinion still serves its purpose of delaying Trump’s trial long enough to prevent any form of accountability before the November election. That was the move all along. And the DOJ delayed & delayed & that helped Trump get away with this. Smh.
Judge Aileen Cannon and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/USDC for the Southern District of Florida)
This is from Eric Tucker at the AP. “Federal judge dismisses Trump classified documents case over concerns with prosecutor’s appointment.”
The federal judge presiding over the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump in Florida dismissed the prosecution on Monday, siding with defense lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, which can be appealed and may later be overturned by a higher court, brings at least, for now, a stunning and abrupt conclusion to a criminal case that at the time it was filed was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats the Republican former president confronted.
…
It’s the latest stroke of good fortune in the four criminal cases Trump has faced. Though he was convicted in May in his New York hush money trial, the sentencing there has been postponed following a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents. That opinion will result in significant delays in a separate case brought by Smith charging Trump with plotting to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Another election subversion case filed by prosecutors in Atlanta has been delayed by revelations of a romantic relationship between the district attorney and a special prosecutor.
I’ve been doing a bit of digging and found this article from Salon on May 7. “Judge Cannon’s secret right-wing getaway: Why didn’t we know about this? Federal judge in Trump’s documents trial didn’t tell us about those right-wing conferences at a Montana resort.” It’s reported by columnist Lucian Truscott IV.
Let me ask you a question: How many all-expenses-paid vacations at luxury hunting and fishing lodges have you enjoyed over the last few years? I’m not talking about a motel in the boonies of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or a drafty log cabin on a lake in Maine or Minnesota. We’re talking about a luxury resort on 1,200 acres alongside the Yellowstone River just outside Yellowstone National Park. We’re talking about a lodge featuring rooms with stone fireplaces that go for upwards of $1,000 a night in high season, meals that include “house-cured meats from local ranches, garden-fresh produce from nearby farms, and, of course plenty of Northwest craft beers and spirits,” as the resort’s website describes the offerings.
It’s called the Sage Lodge in Pray, Montana, and it’s where George Mason University sends gaggles of federal judges for a week-long “colloquium” every year or so. Paid for by the Law and Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School, the “colloquium” held at the Sage Lodge in 2021, for example, featured lectures on such subjects as “Woke Law!” – and yes, the exclamation point is part of the lecture topic — by one Todd J. Zywicki, who is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School and a senior fellow at the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives of the Cato Institute. Another juicy topic covered at the Sage Lodge in 2021 was “Unprofitable Education: Student Loans, Higher Education Costs, and the Regulatory State,” also featuring a lecture by Zywicki, a topic that rings what we might call a rather different bell after the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program last year.
The Antonin Scalia Law School, by the way, was established and largely funded by the efforts of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who helped put together $30 million from conservative donors, including Leo himself, to rename the law school after the late legendary right-wing justice, who it will be remembered died of a heart attack in 2016 at another luxury hunting lodge, that one in Texas, while on a trip paid for by wealthy conservative “friends of the court,” I guess we could call them. The other major donor to the Scalia Law School was the Charles Koch Foundation, which threw in a handy $10 million.
Why are we talking about luxury hunting lodges and right-wing “colloquiums” for judges? Because one of our favorite federal judges, Aileen Cannon of Florida, currently presiding over the case against Donald Trump over the secret documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago, was a guest at that same 2021 “colloquium” at the Sage Lodge, and the one held in 2022 as well. The thing is, Cannon failed to file the form known as a Privately Funded Seminar Disclosure Report, which lists whoever paid for the judge to attend the seminar, who the speakers were and what topics were discussed. The form is supposed to be posted on the website of every federal court within 30 days of the time a judge attending such an all-expenses-paid seminar. Cannon, however, somehow forgot to do so, so anyone who might be interested in learning who was paying for Cannon’s vacations and the nature of her judicial education would have been out of luck.
So why do we suppose Judge Cannon was so shy about who’s paying for her luxury trips and what she might have learned there? Oh, I don’t know … might it be because she didn’t want anyone to know about her links to the Leonard Leo wing of legal theory? Could it have been that she didn’t want it known that she had taken money from an organization that was in large part funded by billionaires friendly to the man whose case she was presiding over?
All these corrupt Republican Judges seem to lead right back to Leonard Leo, don’t they? Something is very rotten here. Marcie of Empty Wheel reads the 93 pages, so we don’t need to.
Procedurally, this may actually not help Trump in the way he’d like (because DOJ has the option of appealing it or having a US Attorney charge Trump).
But it’s also hilarious, since Aileen Cannon has been treating herself like an Appellate Judge that she hasn’t been confirmed to be.
Update: One thing Cannon appears upset about is Merrick Garland’s invocation of Section 533, which appoints FBI-like figures.
Special Counsel Smith argues that Section 533(1) confers on the Attorney General the authority to appoint special counsels, specifically, constitutional officers wielding the “full power and independent authority . . . of any United States Attorney.” 28 C.F.R. § 600.6. After careful review, the Court is convinced that it does not. Congress “does not . . . hide elephants in mouseholes.” Whitman v. Am. Trucking Associations, 531 U.S. 457, 468 (2001). Special Counsel Smith’s interpretation would shoehorn appointment authority for United States Attorney-equivalents into a statute that permits the hiring of FBI law enforcement personnel. Such a reading is unsupported by Section 533’s plain language and statutory context; inconsistent with Congress’s usual legislative practice; and threatens to undermine the “basic separation-of-powers principles” that “give life and content” to the Appointments Clause. Morrison, 487 U.S. at 715 (Scalia, J., dissenting). The Court explains below.
33 Order No. 5730-2023 (appointing David C. Weiss); Order No. 5588-2023 (appointing Robert K. Hur).
That is her only mention of Robert Hur, whose appointment would be unconstitutional under her theory as well. (I’m still trying to figure out whether Cannon will help Hunter Biden go free, too.)
Update: Okay, I’ve read the thing.
It’s hilarious.
It’s hilarious, because it doesn’t create any delay that Cannon was not pursuing anyway. Indeed, Jack Smith could immediately appeal this and try to get her tossed, so it may hasten things (unless Trump wins!).
It’s hilarious because it is unbelievably hubristic. The only credible future for Judge Cannon now is Trump’s first SCOTUS appointment in a second term.
It’s hilarious because the way she did this, if it were upheld (not an impossibility given how nutty SCOTUS has gotten), it would be even more useful for Hunter Biden than Donald Trump (especially if Trump didn’t win reelection), because the statutes of limitation on Hunter’s alleged crimes have started to expire.
So, back to Donald and his surprising recovery from a shooting that killed one and critically injured two. So my Nancy Drew senses started tingling when I saw how composed Donald was after the shooting; he was more worried about getting his shoes than leaving the scene. Posing for pictures all along the way. PB first contacted me with this bit.
Talked to a friend who’s a Psych and body language expert. 100% staged. Look at their unified messaging.
All I could remember where all the times Trump on the last two campaign trails and seemed afraid of everything. This is from Chris Cizzilla and CNN from April 28, 2022. “Donald Trump lived in fear of being hit by, um, ‘dangerous’ fruit.”
Donald Trump feared being killed by thrown fruit.
Yes, you read that right.
In a recently released transcript of a deposition as part of a lawsuit filed by a group of protesters who alleged they were assaulted by Trump’s security guards at a 2015 campaign rally, the subject of fruit – and fruit being flung, in particular – came up.
Here’s the full – and fully epic – back-and-forth between Trump and Benjamin Dictor, an attorney representing the protestors.
Dictor: Okay. And you said that, ‘If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them would you.’ That was your statement?
Trump: Oh, yeah. It was very dangerous.
Dictor: What was very dangerous?
Trump: We were threatened.
Dictor: With what?
Trump: They were going to throw fruit. We were threatened. We had a threat.
Dictor: How did you become aware that there was a threat that people were going to throw fruit?
Trump: We were told. I thought Secret Service was involved in that, actually. And you get hit with fruit, it’s – no – it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that.
Trump attorney Jeffrey Goldman: A tomato is a fruit after all, I guess. … It has seeds.
Just enough time for a NAZI salute also, which is being used by the Press right now. They’re using the fist bumps. The campaign is now using for fundraising and political materials.
And where did Donald get the idea to lead an assassination attempt on himself? This is from Newsweek, May 3, 2023. “Russia Staged Putin ‘Assassination’ to Justify Mass Mobilization: ISW” I know now about self-coups and staged assassination attempts as political tools of fascists. What a world! Funny how Donald has disappeared from the campaign trail for a few weeks but suddenly was paling around with Viktor Orban last week, too.
The alleged attempt to “assassinate” Russian President Vladimir Putin was likely staged by the Kremlin to justify a future effort to mobilize troops for the war in Ukraine, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
The Russian government on Wednesday issued a statement alleging that two Ukrainian drones had been destroyed near Putin’s official residence in Moscow. The Kremlin said that the drones were attempting to carry out “a planned terrorist attack” by assassinating Putin just before “Victory Day” celebrations on May 9. Ukraine has denied any involvement.
While video of the drones dramatically exploding over Kremlin grounds appeared online soon after the purported attack occurred, the incident immediately raised eyebrows, with a number of experts and commentators suggesting that it may have been a staged “propaganda” event intended to drum up Russian support for the war.
ISW, the U.S.-based think tank, said in a report published on Wednesday night that the Russian government “likely staged” the purported assassination attempt “to bring the war home to a Russian domestic audience and set conditions for a wider societal mobilization.”
And then there’s good old Alex Jones, the father of seeing everything as staged with crisis actors. Listen to this. It’s from Patriot Takes. This is a conversation with Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself Trump’s Secretary of Retribution. Check him out on TNR: “Trump Ally Exposed for Horrific Hit List of Political Enemies. Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed “secretary of retribution” is even more bloodthirsty than the former president.” He’s an absolute skinhead. Both BB and I have posted on him before. Please follow the link to Patriot Takes and watch him talk. It’s bone-chilling. BB found this one.
5 months ago, Alex Jones and InfoWars guest Ivan Raiklin discussed how assassinating Trump would be beneficial, according to them, because it would lead to retaliatory “in kind” assassinations of a “deep state” list which includes President Joe Biden.
Ivan Raiklin: “If they [assassinate Trump], option 2, behind Trump, is going to be so much better for us and so much worse them.”
Alex Jones: “I was about as to say, If they kill him, that’s best case scenario from a sick level. From a sick level medium, ‘Oh, please kill him.’ I mean, it’s so good after that.”
Raiklin: “Oh, it’s going to be the best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime. I guaran—, I access, with almost certainty, with the highest level of confidence, that if they assassinate Trump, it is so game over for them.”
There’s no way to blame Biden for the shooter, given his personal history as a gun-toting right-wing Republican, either. “FBI probing motives, the background of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Western Pa. gunman behind Donald Trump assassination attempt. Former classmates described Crooks as politically conservative and a “loner.” Authorities believe the AR-15-style rifle he used belonged to his father.” This is from the Philadelphia Inquirer,
Authorities released few updates Sunday on the progress of their investigation into Trump’s would-be assassin, but a portrait of Crooks — a 2022 graduate of Bethel Park High School who worked as a dietary aide at a local nursing and rehabilitation center — began to emerge.
He had no criminal history, almost no presence on social media, and lived in a middle-class suburb about an hour away from the site of the shooting.
His political leanings were not immediately apparent. Though he was registered as a Republican, according to state voter rolls — and this year’s election would have been the first in which he was eligible to cast a ballot for president — campaign finance reports show a man with the same name gave $15 to a progressive political action committee in January 2021, on the day Biden was sworn into office.***
Crooks’ father, Matthew, reached by CNN late Saturday, said he was trying to figure out “what the hell [was] going on” and declined to comment further until he had spoken with authorities. Attempts to reach other family members were unsuccessful Sunday.
Kevin Rojek, head of the FBI’s field office in Pittsburgh, told reporters Sunday that agents recovered bomb-making material from inside Crooks’ car and his residence. The rifle he used in the attack, which was believed to have been purchased at least six months earlier by his father, as well as Crooks’ cell phone and other evidence had been sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., “for processing and exploitation,” Rojek said.
Meanwhile, several former classmates offered conflicting characterizations of Crooks. Some described him as a loner who had been bullied during his high school years. Jason Kohler, who graduated alongside Crooks, told reporters that students had harassed him “almost every day” and that he often wore “hunting” outfits to class.
“He was just an outcast,” Kohler said.
*** Author note: There’s some evidence this was not the shooter but a 69-year-old man with the same name from Pittsburg.
Here are some additional things I have questions about. Most of these are based on photography at the scene. For example, Kim Wexler’s Ponytail shows this TikTok of a New Angle of Trump at Rally shooting. It basically shows either Donald’s bodyguards or the Secret Service moving photographers close to the stairs. Perhaps for a better shot of the exit act? The TikTok comes from
Why was there such lackluster Security at the Rally?
I had a lot of weird things from early on that I thought were just not right. One was the interview by an MSNBC reporter of a man who was supposed to be standing next to Donald at the podium from the onset. He told the reporter something to the effect that he got up there, introduced himself, and was then told by Donald to go ahead and come up to the podium, only to be quickly told, wait, let’s do that later, and shuffled him off to sit somewhere else. I cannot find that clip by my neighbor across the street, who I had been with earlier for cocktails, who told me that she had seen it, too.
I also heard Frank Figluzzi discuss the fact that it was odd that the roof wasn’t in the area where the check-for-weapons zone was. He also said that on the other side was where the protestors were allowed to gather and even march. My thought was, wow! Sounds like a setup to blame a protestor and let the guy onto the roof. The fact that he was a right-wing Republican gun nut just really puts that on display as planning.
One of the most questionable things is that photos of Trump show him looking in the direction of the building where the shooter was. This is precisely when he turned his head to point to his whiteboard. At that point, local police went to the roof, saw him, and went back down the stairs. There was also a hesitation by the Secret Service Sniper to shoot him. Acyn, the Senior Digital Editor for MeidasTouch.com, captured this on CSPN. He’s looking directly at the shooter and then angling towards the White Board. The shooter was only about 165ish feet away from Donald. That’s definitely a distance that a good sniper could handle.
So, several things I noticed from this bit. First, when you speak to a large audience, you look straight ahead. You do not fixate on a spot to your right. Nowadays, politicians use teleprompters, but the ones that are guarded by the Secret Service have bulletproof shields. Do you see one?
I had another conversation with a neighbor this morning who has friends who have been military snipers, and their hypothesis on this I would put under the conspiracy theory. They’re saying they think the Republican Party mainstream was working with the Secret Service to take him out. That’s pure speculation. It’s obvious, though, that there’s something wrong with the security there.
This is from NPR. “The Secret Service is investigating how the man who shot Trump got as close as he did.” House leaders have already ordered a full investigation and demanded the head of the Secret Service testify before them while they have already had a briefing. It is already a bit of the usual zoo since Jim Comer is likely to lead the investigation.
The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how a gunman armed with an AR-style rifle was able to get close enough to shoot and injure former President Donald Trump at a rally Saturday in Pennsylvania, a monumental failure of one the agency’s core duties.
The gunman, who was killed by Secret Service personnel, fired multiple shots at the stage from an “elevated position outside of the rally venue,” the agency said.
An Associated Press analysis of more than a dozen videos and photos taken at the Trump rally, as well as satellite imagery of the site, shows the shooter was able to get astonishingly close to the stage where the former president was speaking. A video posted to social media and geolocated by the AP shows the body of a man wearing gray camouflage lying motionless on the roof of a manufacturing plant just north of the Butler Farm Show grounds, where Trump’s rally was held.
The roof was less than 150 meters (yards) from where Trump was speaking, a distance from which a decent marksman could reasonably hit a human-sized target. For reference, 150 meters is a distance at which U.S. Army recruits must hit a scaled human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M16 assault rifle in basic training. The AR-15, like the shooter at the Trump rally had, is the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M16.
Some of the weirdest Republican attacks have been on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who is a 27-year-old veteran of the force. She is being called a DEI hire by really nasty Republican pols. She is the second woman to have the office. Of course, these black faces and the woman who heads the agency are suspected of being in a “deep state.” I won’t go deeper into any of these cringeworthy moments.
On Monday, Cheatle said in a statement: “Since the shooting, I have been in constant contact with Secret Service personnel in Pennsylvania who worked to maintain the integrity of the crime scene until the FBI assumed its role as the lead investigating agency into the assassination attempt.”
She added that the Secret Service is working with other law enforcement agencies to “understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again. … We will also work with the appropriate Congressional committees on any oversight action.”
Neither Cheatle or the Secret Service’s communications office have weighed in on criticism of women in the agency more broadly.
I have a few more weird angles from various drones and photogs that make me even more suspicious, but according to White Christian Nationalists, it’s all just a miracle. I’m sticking with a staged attempt ala Putin because that seems more in line with Trump’s lack of anything decent.
So, I’m open to comments and criticism, but this is my case so far. I’m likely not going to leave this rabbit hole for a while. Keep an eye on the things Republicans don’t want you to know. And please, don’t take in any of the stupidity of the Republican Convention. This one is going to be insane.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Preview of the Republican Convention
More Questions from Friends
I have an update from the FBI.
Update on the FBI Investigation of the Attempted Assassination of Former President Donald Trump
Update: July 15, 2024, 3:05 p.m. EDT:
The FBI continues to investigate the shooting incident at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, as an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and as potential domestic terrorism. The investigation is still in the early stages, and the FBI is providing the following updates:
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FBI technical specialists successfully gained access to Thomas Matthew Crooks’ phone, and they continue to analyze his electronic devices.
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The search of the subject’s residence and vehicle are complete.
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The FBI has conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses. That work continues.
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The FBI has received hundreds of digital media tips which include photos and videos taken at the scene, and we continue to review incoming tips. We encourage anyone with information that may assist with the ongoing investigation to continue to submit it online at tips.fbi.gov or call 1-800-CALL-FBI.
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While the investigative work continues, FBI victim services personnel have offered assistance to the victims of Saturday’s incident.
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