Yesterday the Senate voted down a war resolution, led by Dem Sen. Tim Kaine, intended “to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities within or against Venezuela, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force.” The only Republicans who voted with the Dems were Rand Paul (a co-sponsor) and Lisa Murkowski.

Today, thanks to reporting by the Associated Press, we know more about the men who have been killed at great expense by the awesome might of the U.S. military.

One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.

The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs. President Donald Trump and top U.S. officials have alleged the craft were being operated by narco-terrorists and cartel members bound with deadly drugs for American communities. …

… In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.

Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.

Further, the “open-hulled fishing skiffs” were bound for “nearby Trinidad and other islands,” not the United States.

Yes, these are the dangerous “narco-terrorists.” If any of these boats had been bound for the U.S., I’m sure the Coast Guard could have taken care of the problem in conventional ways. Instead, the Trump Administration has chosen the path of “extra-judicial executions” that violates international law and wastes taxpayer dollars dropping bombs. Not to mention deploying an aircraft carrier, multiple destroyers, and an amphibious ready group with over 4,500 personnel, plus a special operations vessel, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, Marine helicopters, Ospreys, and fighter jets in the Caribbean to menace Venezuela. I can’t even begin to guess how much all this is costing taxpayers.

I’m sure it will amuse you to learn that this morning the Trump Administration asked a court to block another judge’s order to distribute the full November SNAP benefits. So Trump didn’t get the message the voters sent this week.

Update: Today the appeals court refused to block the other judge’s order. The Regime has appealed to the Supreme Court, asking SCOTUS to block the order by 9 p.m. tonight.

This is by Susan Glasser at The New Yorker:

Was this the week that America finally started clapping back at Donald Trump? Actions trigger reactions; we all know that. Yet, remarkably, Trump has spent the first nine months back in the White House plowing forward as if, channelling Lenin, there was all mush and no steel to meet his advance. Only a man who truly feared no political consequences could have chosen to hold a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago estate on the weekend before important off-year elections and amid a federal-government shutdown that is causing millions of poor Americans to wait indefinitely for monthly food assistance. In the face of such evident political malpractice, many wondered whether a video of the event, which showed a scantily clad woman gyrating in an oversized Martini glass, was an A.I.-generated stunt to make Trump look bad. But, no, it was real. He is actually that brazen.

This is as much as I could read before I hit the paywall. But does Trump really fear no political consequences? I can’t say that he really didn’t care about the results of Tuesday’s election. He’s been trying to influence the New York City mayoral race in various ways, from endorsing Andrew Cuomo to threatening to withhold federal funds from the city if Zohran Mamdani. Knowing New Yorkers, this probably helped Zohran Mamdani. Trump spoke up about several of the other races also. Plus if he didn’t care about next year’s midterms, he wouldn’t be pushing so hard for Republican state redistricting.

He did learn a new magic word — affordability — on Tuesday night.

So if he just uses his magic word enough, voters will still love him. Got it. But he’s not going to do anything differently.

And it may be that he genuinely doesn’t understand that the economy isn’t better than it was last year. He’s got plenty of money. The stock market has been doing great, right? What else is there to know? (But this week the stock market has been wobbly. It may be the AI bubble is deflating. Stay tuned.)

Trump’s political success mostly comes from his mob-boss aggression combined with a grifter’s instinct for saying what his marks want to hear. He’s still got the first attribute, but I believe the second one is failing him. And even if he could use the right words, his declaration that the prices of groceries are way down isn’t going to override people’s experience buying groceries. Which tells us prices aren’t down. But I don’t think he grasps that. Reality is supposed to be whatever he says it is.

So he’s not going to stop being the Great Gatsby/Marie Antoinette president even as the job market dries up and prices continue to inflate. And I’m sure all the flight cancellations before the holiday season aren’t helping him, either.

It’s possible that if Trump could pivot to paying attention to his actual job, bring down the cost of living, and stop being such a princess, his approval ratings would go back up. But I don’t think he’s capable of doing that. And I don’t think he appreciates how the public perceives his personal extravagances when everyone else is in belt-tightening mode.

The number crunchers are still looking at voting patterns from Tuesday night. And they’re telling us that the demographic groups that flipped to Trump in 2024 all flipped the other way this week. See The 2024 Trump “realignment” is already over for a good overview.

Also, too:  See DOJ Admits to Republicans That Epstein Files Are Even Worse for Trump by Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling at The New Republic.  One suspects that whatever is being held back could absolutely destroy Trump politically. And it will come out eventually. Maybe not before the Trump Era has ended, but it will come out. There will be no rehabilitation for him.

It’s been a while.

It’s possible that, somewhere in the U.S., a Republican won an election yesterday. But I can’t find any examples.

The unofficial results in my voting precinct show a Democratic sweep across the ballot, but in Westchester that’s not unusual. These were mostly incumbents. But elsewhere — wow.

Mamdani, Sherrill, Spanberger, and Prop 50 all won decisively. Not even close. There were some down-ballot wins that were also significant.

VA: Democrats flipped at least 13 seats in the House of Delegates to expand their narrow majority.

GA: Democrats won two seats on the Public Service Commission, their first statewide wins in non-federal races in Georgia since 2006.

PA: Three incumbent justices on the state Supreme Court were retained, preserving a liberal majority for another two years.

ME: A ballot initiative mandating voter ID was resoundingly defeated.

CO: A ballot initiative to raise taxes on high earners to fund free school breakfasts and lunches passed overwhelmingly.

Here’s another one: Mississippi Democrats Break Republican Senate Supermajority, Flipping 3 Legislative Seats.

I think it’s safe to say that yesterday’s election results are causing a lot of re-thinking this morning. For Republicans, it must be like going to sleep in a Hilton and waking up in a Motel 6. Or maybe they were in a Motel 6 all along and just didn’t realize it. But now at least some of them are having to face facts, or at least one fact, which is that Trump is an albatross. And congressional Republicans facing re-election next year need to think long and hard about their relationship with MAGA and Donald Trump.NPR:

The president is unpopular and a drag on his party when he’s not on the ballot, but also, when he’s not on the ballot, the GOP can’t seem to turn out conservatives.

Trump’s numbers with independents haven’t been good since early on in his second term as president, as lots of them disapprove of the job he’s doing on the economy and think he’s gone too far with how he’s approached a policy of mass deportations.

In these elections, according to the exit polls, as of 1 a.m. ET — independents made up a third of the electorate in Virginia, and Democrat Abigail Spanberger won those voters by 19 points in the governor’s race. It was a similar story in New Jersey, where they made up 31% and went for Democrat Mikie Sherrill by 13 points.

It’s a real quandary for Republicans. It was true during his first term as president, too, that in these non-presidential election years, Trump brings people out to the polls in the wrong way for the GOP. If you’re a Republican, that has to be figured out. But so few want to cross Trump, and show a public break with him, that that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon for the party en masse.

In other words, the MAGA “movement” really is a one-man band, a Trump cult of personality, and not really a “movement” in any sense of the word. If you’re a Republican, hitching yourself to Trump and MAGA plus about $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee at McDonald’s. If Trump isn’t on the ballot — and he will never be on a ballot again — MAGA voters won’t reliably turn out for anyone else even if Trump tells them to.

And if you’re a Republican, what’s the downside to crossing Trump, really? Other than his saying nasty things about you? What’s he actually going to do?  Order his girl Pam to indict you for something? Well, I guess that’s possible.

The NPR article goes on to say that Trump’s support among Latinos, which helped him defeat Kamala Harris last year, appears to have collapsed. If so, this could seriously screw up the Texas redistricting scheme for Republicans. I understand the Texas congressional district maps were redrawn with the assumption that Republicans in 2026 could get the same support from Latinos that Trump got in 2024. If Texas Latinos swing back to Democrats as much as they did in yesterday’s elections, Texas might not add those five Republican House seats Trump is counting on.

I went out to vote this afternoon. My precinct is just electing local officials. Plus there is a ballot initiative about building Nordic ski and biathlon trails in the Adirondacks. Sure, why not? The polling place was doing brisk business for an off-year election, seemed to me. Although I can’t compare it to last year, since I voted early last year.

So when I got back home to my laptop, the first thing I saw was this:

This is the headllne from Talking Points Memo; here is the story.  And this cartoon immediately came to mind:

But the “White House” says Americans will still get partial SNAP payments in spite of what Trump said, according to Politico.

The post seemingly contradicted his own administration’s actions to abide by a federal judge’s decision requiring officials to use emergency money to pay for at least some SNAP benefits. USDA earlier on Tuesday had delivered guidance to states on how to fund half of November benefits.

Trump’s announcement quickly sent lawmakers and administration officials scrambling to clarify next steps for the nation’s largest anti-hunger initiative, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter, who were granted anonymity to share private details.

“We are getting the payments out the door as quickly as we can. USDA sent the guidance to the states,” Leavitt added. “The president is referring to future SNAP payments. He does not want to have to keep tapping into an emergency fund and depleting it in the case of a catastrophe in this country.”

Apparently somebody is overriding Trump’s tantrums. Trump never expected the shutdown to last this long. And now he’s getting frantic. This is also from Politico:

In early October, several Trump administration officials had a friendly pool going of how long the shutdown would last. The White House, at the time, was confident Democrats would quickly fold.

No one guessed more than 10 days. …

… When the shutdown began, White House officials were certain the Trump administration was better positioned to battle the left during a funding lapse.

Trump and his top aides thought that unpaid federal workers, closed and limited federal facilities and threats of ever-more job cuts from Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, would be too much for Democrats to handle.

Trump also is still raving about killing the filibuster rule (yes! please!). Axios:

President Trump’s Truth Social demands to end the filibuster are just a hint of his coming rampage if Senate Republicans hold out against him, advisers tell Axios.

Why it matters: Most Senate Republicans have no interest in nuking the filibuster. But Trump’s frustration is the first clear sign that the shutdown, which becomes a record on Wednesday, is getting to him.

“He will make their lives a living hell,” one Trump adviser told Axios.

“He will call them at three o’clock in the morning. He will blow them up in their districts. He will call them un-American. He will call them old creatures of a dying institution. Believe you me, he’s going to make their lives just hell,” the source continued.

Another adviser emphasized: “He’s really mad about this.”

The article goes on to say that “For weeks, Trump wasn’t paying close attention to the shutdown out of a belief that Democrats would eventually drop their demands.” But now he’s paying attention and making demands. This is going to get messy.

I’ll be watching returns later tonight and probably blogging a bit more. Go ahead and add comments about the elections or anything else to the comments.

Update: The first big result is that NBC has called the Virginia governor’s race for Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat.

Update: Mamdani wins! Such a relief. Cuomo really disgraced himself in this campaign. Maybe he’ll slink away and disappear now.

And Mikie Sherrill won the governor’s race in NewJersey. A good night for Democrats. It’ll be interesting to see the margins, but I will look at that tomorrow.

Dick the Dick is done.

Something that’s possibly not getting enough coverage:

On September 4, President Donald Trump sent a letter to Congress in accordance with the War Powers Resolution to report on the September 2 military strike on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea, targeting and killing 11 individuals allegedly engaged in illicit drug trafficking. Since then, the U.S. military has carried out at least 13 additional attacks on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific, killing more than 60 people that the administration asserts were trafficking drugs into the United States. We focus here on one slice of the domestic legal issues these strikes raise: the statutory requirement that the Executive Branch cease any use of military force without Congressional authorization past Monday, when the War Powers Resolution’s “60-day clock” runs out.

The clock does not authorize force; it is an additional statutory constraint along with the reporting requirements built into the War Powers Resolution. In other words, even when a president is acting under his or her constitutional authority to use force, the statute requires that the operations terminate after 60 days if Congress has not yet approved of the operations.

So time runs out tomorrow. But the Administration has decided that the War Powers Act doesn’t apply to whatever our military is doing in the Caribbean Sea. Trump, or whoever is directing this, intends to keep bombing random boats.

The Justice Department told Congress this week that President Trump could lawfully continue his lethal military strikes on people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, notwithstanding a time limit for congressionally unauthorized deployments of armed forces into “hostilities.”

In a briefing, the official who leads the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, T. Elliot Gaiser, said the administration did not think the operation rose to the kind of “hostilities” covered by the 60-day limit, a key part of a 1973 law called the War Powers Resolution, according to several people familiar with the matter.

In a statement provided by the White House, an unnamed senior administration official said that American service members were not in danger because the boats suspected of smuggling drugs were mostly being struck by drones far from naval ships carrying U.S. forces.

Going back to the first article linked above, at Just Security, which explains the War Powers Act —

In addition to its well-known 48-hour reporting requirements, the War Powers Resolution includes a provision known as the “60-day clock.” In short, within 60 calendar days after a 48-hour report is submitted (or was required to have been submitted) on the introduction of U.S. armed forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities, the President shall terminate any such use of the armed forces unless Congress (1) has declared war or enacted a specific authorization for such use of force; (2) has extended by law the 60-day period; or (3) is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack on the United States. None of these things have happened here.

The War Powers Resolution allows the President to extend the 60-day period by an additional 30 days if the President determines and certifies to Congress that “unavoidable military necessity respecting the safety of United States Armed Forces requires the continued use of such armed forces in the course of bringing about a prompt removal of such forces.” Unsurprisingly given the prompt removal requirement, the President has not made this certification. This means that, by operation of law, the administration must terminate the use of U.S. armed forces in hostilities against suspected narcotraffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific by Monday, 60 days after the September 4 report was submitted.

We do not expect the President to terminate this use of force per this requirement. He and Secretary Pete Hegseth have made very clear these strikes will continue. But we would expect that Executive Branch lawyers advising the President and other senior policy officials would have informed them about the clock, likely when the decision was made to submit a War Powers Report in early September. (We should note that, to our knowledge, no additional 48-hour reports have been submitted since September 4. At least one notice under section 1230 of the FY 2024 NDAA was subsequently submitted, and it is possible that additional reports under section 1230, or under other reporting requirements like 10 U.S.C. 130f, have been submitted to Congress that have not been made public).

Also,

While past administrations of both parties have contributed to the expansion of the President’s claims to unilateral war-making authority and have often found ways to circumvent the requirements in the War Powers Resolution, this administration’s action – in both substance and messaging – represents an unprecedented expansion of Executive Branch authority over the use of force.

Now see Reuters, How the US is preparing a military staging ground near Venezuela. In brief, the U.S. is upgrading a long-abandoned naval base in Puerto Rico. Also, too,

The U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean began in August with the arrival of warships, a nuclear-powered submarine, fighter jets and spy planes.

The Ford aircraft carrier strike group, with roughly 10,000 troops and dozens of aircraft and weapons systems, is on its way from the Adriatic Sea. One of the Ford’s destroyers cleared Gibraltar on October 29, according to satellite imagery and ship tracking data.

Trump is going to attack Venezuela, if he doesn’t have a stroke first.

Abraham Lincoln never slept in the Lincoln bedroom because, when he was President, the room wasn’t a bedroom. He used the space as an office and cabinet meeting room. He signed the Emancipation Proclamation in that room. Here is a painting of that event by Francis Bicknell Carpenter. I can’t swear this is an accurate depiction of the room, but by all accounts the room had green wallpaper.

I don’t know which presidents used the space as an office after Lincoln, but at some point it was taken over by senior staff while the presidents set up offices elsewhere. The space was turned into a guest bedroom and dubbed the “Lincoln bedroom” during the Truman Administration.

You’ve probably heard that Trump is mightily proud of his remodeling of the bathroom adjacent to the Lincoln Bedroom.

We can be reasonably certain Trump didn’t use the Lincoln-era marble, since the bathroom didn’t exist until the Truman Administration. This is probably why the thing looked like a standard 1950s-era bathroom. People keep calling it “art deco,” but I’m not seeing the art deco. I’m seeing postwar bleh. I’m not sure what era Trump’s remodel resembles — late Roman Empire, maybe? — but it looks nothing like any 1860s interior I’ve ever seen. Lincoln was POTUS right smack in the middle of the Victorian age, which was all about dark furniture and fussy details. Here’s a Victorian-age bathroom:

UNITED KINGDOM – NOVEMBER 16: Victorian bathroom, c 1880s. Victorian bathroom showing water closet and sink. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

Yes, wealthy Victorian age people did have indoor plumbing and flush toilets. Indoor plumbing and flush toilets were installed in the White House in the 1850s.  Lincoln’s house in Illinois had a well and an outhouse, however, like the homes of most folks at the time.

More on what Trump did with the bathroom:

Lots of gold, notice. Just like Lincoln would have wanted, right? Do see Margaret Hartmann in New York magazine, Trump Adds Gold and Marble to Lincoln Bathroom, As Abe Would Have Wanted. She notes that “Marble walls and floors with polished gold fixtures certainly weren’t common for bathrooms of the time.”

Hartmann also recalls a big source of friction in the Lincoln household. When Mary Lincoln moved into the White House she was shocked at how run down the place was. So she went on a redecorating spree, She bought new rugs and wallpaper and drapes and paintings and chandeliers and furniture. She went over a congressional appropriation for redecorating by 30 percent. When Lincoln learned of this from the White House Commissioner of Public Buildings, a fellow named Benjamin Brown French, Lincoln was furious.

“It would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the president of the United States had approved a bill over-running an appropriation of $20,000 for flub dubs for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets,” he shouted at French.

We cannot know what Lincoln would have thought of the Trump bathroom. He might have thought it more worthy of Napoleon III, who was Emperor of the French in Lincoln’s day. than of an American president. But if you then told him that Trump was spending money on statuary marble and gold bathroom fixtures while denying food to 16 million children, I suspect he would have interesting things to say about that. Never mind the $300 million ballroom.

Which is why Lincoln was a great president, and Trump isn’t. But it also underscores, once again, that Trump knows absolutely nothing about U.S. history and doesn’t seem interested in learning. And if he thinks Lincoln would have approved of the bathroom project he knows nothing about Abraham Lincoln, obviously, especially what sort of man he was.

Last night Chris Hayes tied several things together. He noted that regime change in Venezuela has long been an obsession of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller appears to be running the anti-immigrant secret police, and Russell Vought  is seizing control of all government spending. All while Trump is throwing parties and remodeling the White House.

I can’t say I’m too worried about Trump getting a third term, because even if his health holds out that long (fat chance) his political capital will be long spent. Even Republicans will finally want him gone, I suspect. But he’s not really doing the job now. His senior staff are all just running their own projects while he happily travels and plays golf and redecorates.

So this just happened.

Two federal judges ruled nearly simultaneously on Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration must to continue to fund SNAP, the nation’s biggest food aid program, using contingency funds during the government shutdown.

The rulings came a day before the U.S. Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because it said it could no longer keep funding it due to the shutdown.

This was not a surprise. I would have been shocked if the rulings had gone the other way. I haven’t seen any reaction from the Regime yet.

For the record, the states that sued the Regime to force it to make SNAP payments are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. 

See also Paul Krugman, Too Cruel Too Soon: How Republicans messed up on Project 2025. The plan was to postpone the pain until after the Midterms.

Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer.

But the consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections. For example, draconian work requirements for Medicaid — which would effectively throw millions off the program, largely by imposing paperwork burdens low-wage workers can’t overcome — weren’t scheduled to take effect until the end of 2026.

Why the backloading? Presumably Republicans believed that by the time Americans woke up to what was happening, the G.O.P. would have effectively consolidated one-party rule, making future elections irrelevant.

Instead, however, the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule.

Do read the whole thing.

There’s too much happening. Or not happening. This morning there were headlines saying that the FBI had thwarted a terrorist plot maybe connected to ISIS set to strike in Detroit. Arrests were made. .Everybody should be grateful to Kash Patel for saving Detroit. But wait …

The alleged plot involved a group of young people, some of whom are minors, who had been engaging online with Islamic extremist content. But the sources said the investigation was in its early stages, with no criminal charges prepared and no clear understanding of what exactly the suspects planned to do and where.

So it was just a bunch of kids on the Internet? Does that mean there were no arrests?

Justice officials registered concern that Patel appeared to have acted hastily on the probe without Main Justice’s approval, with the apparent goal of seeking some credit for the FBI, but in a way that could interfere with the investigation, according to the sources.

This is news? A day without Kash Patel screwing up would be news.

Also this morning, there were headlines declaring the U.S. is “poised to strike military targets in Venezuela in escalation against Maduro regime.” And then there were headlines saying “Venezuela pleads with Moscow, Beijing for help.” This the day after Trump was demanding we start doing nuclear weapons tests again. And I’m thinking, oh good. World War III. But now Trump is saying he’s not considering strikes inside Venezuela.  Until he changes his mind, of course.

See also Greg Sargent, Trump Boat Bombings Worsen as New Horror Shakes Experts: “Alarm Bells.”

Trump may have noticed that the polls mostly blame him for the shutdown. Now he is telling the Senate to kill the filibuster rule to end the shutdown. See Aaron Blake, who now works for CNN, Trump just kneecapped the GOP’s shutdown strategy.

Trump late Thursday night urged Republicans to end the shutdown by invoking the so-called “nuclear option” — that is, getting rid of the filibuster and 60-vote threshold in the Senate. This would allow Republicans to pass things on party-line votes in the GOP-controlled Senate. …

…That Trump would call for this is not terribly surprising; he has spent years occasionally urging Republican leaders to scrap the filibuster. Nor is it particularly likely to provide an actual offramp in the shutdown; those same GOP leaders have steadfastly declined Trump’s entreaties before and rejected this idea repeatedly in recent weeks. It’s not even clear whether enough senators would vote for such a change if GOP leaders went along with it.

So practically speaking, it’s a pointless interjection from the president.

But it does matter in one way: It’s Trump yet again inserting himself into these kinds of talks in ways that are thoroughly unhelpful to his party. And this has become a trend.

The reason it’s unhelpful in this case is that it legitimizes Democrats’ talking point that Republicans could end this shutdown any time they want to. And that could make it harder for Republicans to shake the blame they’ve been saddled with.

Republicans in Congress have responded with a loud and firm no way in hell.  I don’t see them changing their minds, no matter what Trump wants.

What will end the shutdown? I do not know. I do wonder if we’re approaching a point at which it’s too late to stop the health care cuts from going into effect, and maybe then the Democrats will announce there is nothing more they can do. But polls are saying more voters blame Republicans than Democrats. So who will blink first? Again, I have no idea. I believe it will continue for a while.

There is some new reporting about Jeffrey Epstein, but I haven’t had time to digest it. But here are a couple of links — Bloomberg, Jeffrey Epstein Was Investigated For Money Laundering, Emails Reveal and Travis Davis at Raw Story, Ex-Trump official in hot water as new Epstein probe exposes trove of incriminating emails.

Happy Hallowe’en.

At The Atlantic, Michael McFaul writes that Trump Is Demolishing Four Pillars of American Power (gift link). You may recognize McFaul as a big-shot foreign policy guy and academic who is a frequent guest on MSNBC.. The article begins:

In less than a year, President Donald Trump has drained many of the most important sources of American power. He is unwinding the country’s alliances, degrading its principles, walling off its economy, and subverting international institutions that serve its interests. The speed of the onslaught has made grasping all of its perils nearly impossible, especially as China and Russia pose a growing threat to the United States. But if you want to begin to see how much Trump has eroded America’s ability to win today’s great-power competition, consider the last one.

The United States won the Cold War for at least four major reasons: It built stronger partnerships than the Soviet Union did. It championed ideas about democracy and human rights that the world found more compelling than the Kremlin’s communism. It bolstered a global financial order that advanced American goals. And its open economy outperformed the Soviet Union’s closed one, allowing the U.S. to support a superior military.

Today America faces a different kind of Cold War, one in which China plays a bigger role than Russia. But these same four pillars will almost certainly determine the outcome. A prudent leader would reinforce them; Trump is bulldozing them.

McFaul elaborates from there. Worth reading.

Trump is in Asia right now. He’s supposed to have a summit with Xi Jinping this week. Xi wants to press Trump on U.S. policy toward Taiwan. If I were Taiwanese, I’d be terrified.

Speaking of why people should be terrified — Trump did not have a good day in Japan. He seems to have lost track of where he is. He was with Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, but he just kind of wandered off.

I’m worried for Taiwan. Also in Asia, Trump spoke to U.S. troops stationed in Japan and went on and on about how he wants to send them into U.S. cities.

“We have cities that are troubled, we can’t have cities that are troubled,” Trump said, while delivering a campaign rally-style speech to service members at the Yokosuka Naval Base. “And we’re sending in our National Guard, and if we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard, because we’re going to have safe cities.”

“We’re not going to have people killed in our cities,” he continued. “And whether people like that or not, that’s what we’re doing.”

Homicide rates had already dropped considerably in Chicago in the months before Trump sent in federal agents pretending to be troops. Whether Trump’s storm troopers are making any difference to the crime rate remains to be seen.

See also Josh Marshall, There Is No Democratic Future Without Supreme Court Reform (gift article)..

There is no future for civic democracy in this country without reforming the Supreme Court. Putting that more specifically, the only way to recover from Donald Trump’s rapid lunge into an authoritarian American future is a future point at which Democrats regain control of the federal government — a trifecta — and institute a series of laws which cut off the channels Trump has exploited to get us to this point. That doesn’t solve the problem of Trumpism. The core issue is that very large minority of Americans who support his style of autocratic government. But that cuts off many various paths Trump has used to build a presidential autocracy under the thin cover of law. 

One of those reforms, he says, is to ban partisan and racial gerrymandering. A future Democratic Congress could do that.  This was attempted in 2021, in fact, but the Massive Obstacle known as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema stood in the way of letting Dems kill the filibuster rule. But even if such a bill were passed, John Roberts’s court could still gut it the way the Voting Rights Act has been gutted.

Meanwhile, Trump allies are telling him to declare one of his fake emergencies so he can (allegedly) take control of the midterm elections to make sure Dems lose. Thanks loads, Manchin and Sinema.

At the Atlantic, Nancy Walecki tried to find out where the rubble from the East Wing is being dumped. (This is a gift link.) She couldn’t find the rubble, but she did follow dump trucks full of soil from the site that were leaving the grounds and being hauled to a public golf course called East Potomac Golf Links,

Donald Trump has reportedly been considering rebranding East Potomac Golf Links as the Washington National Golf Course and giving it a makeover. He even mocked up a new golden logo for it that’s nearly identical to those of the courses he owns. I suppose the East Wing demolition is an excellent source of soil.

Say what? This is a municipal golf course within the District of Columbia that does have some connection to the National Park Service. Apparently Trump doesn’t have enough to do. This is weird.

But the golf course might want to refuse to use that dirt. There’s been a lot of concern that the demolition was done without trying to contain any asbestos or mold that might have been in the building. A lot of additions were made to the East Wing in the 1940s when asbestos insulation was at peak use. Asbestos is harmless as long as it is contained within walls, but the little fibers are known to cause cancer if breathed in. So you don’t want to just let them loose into the air. See this also.

I regret I am out of New York Times gift links for October. This op ed is by Finn Brunton, the author of “Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency.” This article brilliantly links together cryptocurrency, libertarianism, and tech bros as the powers propping up Donald Trump. If anyone does have NT Times gift links to spare, please add to the comments.

Another NY Times article worth reading is Trump’s Path of Destruction Is Far-Reaching by Jamelle Bouie. This column has three sections. One is on the New York mayoral race, the next is on the East Wing, and the last is on Trump’s Caribbean killing spree. And since I’m out of gift links, for now I’ll post the part about the mayoral race.

With the above in mind, do read Paul Krugman, Trump’s Gilded Ballroom and the Fall of the American Republic. The subtitle is “Tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand.”

This is what the final project is supposed to look like. This is ghastly. But as Krugman writes, this is about dominance, not esthetics.

I’m learning a lot about the White House this week. I did the standard tour of it years ago that I only dimly remember, but of course they only walk you through a few parts of the building. There are a lot of questions about what is happening to the famous bunker, which I understand is beneath the East Wing. That must be gone, too. there are questions about the actual architectural plans for the gilded imperial ballroom, assuming there are any, which no one has seen other than (I assume) Trump and the architect. Here’s a profile of the architect from an architectural journal. Other architects are not thrilled. I like this conclusion:

In the end, though, the design’s larger meaning may have less to do with the style wars than with the unapologetically transactional posture of the second Trump administration. If the president succeeds in getting the ballroom built before he leaves office, as he’s said he intends to, the galas held there won’t be about national unity or cultural excellence, and the tickets for them, in ways literal and otherwise, won’t be free. It will be a place to kiss the ring, to bend the knee, and to pay for the privilege. What the design suggests is not so much a bloated classicism or an effort to turn Washington into Mar-a-Lago north, although it is both of those things, as a blueprint for making concrete the notion that the White House has turned in some fundamental sense into a retail outlet, a place where access and influence are nakedly bought and sold.

In other news, see Trump orders US carrier strike group to Caribbean.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced the move on X, saying the deployment “will bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere. ”

Trump really, really, really wants to start a war with Venezuela. Maybe he thinks this will give him an excuse to cancel elections. Maybe he thinks we can invade Venezuela and claim it like Putin is trying in Ukraine.

According to all available information illegal drugs are not coming into the United States via the Caribbean in fishing boats. Most are coming across the border from Mexico. What drugs do arrive by sea are smuggled on commercial ships, hidden within large shipments. I honestly think Trump is bombing boats in the Caribbean because he gets off on watching the videos. 

The alleged President has the intellectual and emotional capacity of a spoiled brat 8-year-old in a decrepit old man’s body. The worst of everything.

This morning’s headlines had Trump throwing a tantrum at Canada because of a video in which Ronald Reagan is explaining why tariffs cause problems. The Associated Press:

Trump posted, “The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs.”

The ad was paid for by the Ontario provincial government, not the Canadian federal government. The Ontario government said it planned to pay $54 million (about $75 million Canadian) for the ads to air across multiple American television stations using audio and video of then-President Reagan speaking about tariffs in 1987.

“They only did this to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”

The New York Times:

But the advertisement, which Ontario’s provincial government purchased to air in the United States, uses sound bites from a radio address Mr. Reagan made in April 1987 that was critical of tariffs. It reproduces Mr. Reagan’s quotes accurately, but changes the order he said them.

I doubt very much that the ad misrepresented Ragan’s views. Here’s the uncut radio address:

Here’s the ad:

You can decide. One thing’s for sure, a lot more people will see the ad now that Trump threw a fit about it.