Today Trump affirmed that he still plans mass deportations, and his plans involve him using presidential emergency powers and “military assets.” Whether there is much more to these plans is hard to tell. Josh Kovensky at TPM writes,
For Trump, the lack of seriousness or specifics here is tangled up with the broader point: he wants “military assets,” whatever that may mean, in the United States. And, he wants you to know about it.
Policy shops staffed with officials from Trump’s first administration spent much of the once and future President’s time in the political wilderness drafting plans for domestic deployment of the military. One piece invoked War on Terror-era legal justifications to argue that the President could use active duty soldiers to conduct domestic immigration enforcement.
See Trump’s immigration crackdown is expected to start on Day 1 at Politico to appreciate the complexity of this issue. It’s going to be a mess.
A sign of the times — Sweden issues pamphlet telling citizens what to do if Russia attacks.
A Message from Vlad — This is from a few days ago. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before. Fred Kaplan at Slate writes,
First, Putin waited two days before congratulating Trump on his victory. One can imagine Trump receiving phone calls from kowtowing leaders the world over—Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, the chief of NATO, the European heads of state—all the while wondering about the man whom he’s admired publicly and privately for the past eight years: When is Vladimir going to call?
Then, in response to Trump’s claim that during their phone call, he asked—in some accounts, warned—Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine, a Kremlin spokesman denied that the two had spoken on the phone at all. (Putin issued his belated congratulations at a news conference.)
I don’t know who’s telling the truth, a practice for which neither man has a sterling reputation. But either way, in the next few weeks, when Putin orders 50,000 fresh recruits (including 10,000 imported North Korean soldiers) to go on the next rampage—ousting Ukrainian soldiers from the thin slice of Russian territory they hold, then retaking soil across the border in Donbas province—he can tell a complaining Trump that he doesn’t recall any such conversation. If Trump thinks Putin actually will refrain from stepping up attacks on Ukraine as a friendly favor … well, maybe our once-and-future president will learn a lesson about the limits of personal relations in the face of perceived national interests early in his second term.
The final twist of this saga came on Monday, when Nikolai Patrushev, an aide to Putin who was previously director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, made the following comment in an interview with the Moscow newspaper Kommersant:
The election campaign is over. To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.
This is a mind-blowing bit of psychological warfare! The Russians are basically telling Trump: We put you in office. Now it’s time for you to pay us back.
No pressure or anything.
This is from January, this year – Politico
Trump told an Iowa audience that he considered, but held back from, deploying the military to inner cities to fight crime. He also called New York City and Chicago “crime dens.”
“And one of the other things I’ll do — because you’re supposed to not be involved in that — you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in. The next time, I’m not waiting,” Trump said in November.
I found the stats – I'm going to name the five states where the the cities with the highest murder rates per capita are. 1) Louisiana 2) Missouri 3) Maryland 4) Pennsylvania 5) Tennessee. Four of those states went for Trump, yet none of them seem to be worthy of federal military protection. New York and Illinois are not in the top five. So what do NY and IL have in common? I'll wait.
Trump got push-back in his first term when he proposed using federal troops against peaceful protesters. Ignoring the fact that it's illegal, it's not good for troop morale to demand that US soldiers fire on unarmed crowds where their mothers and brothers may well be. Trump knows the military will oppose the plan. Link that fact up with the threat to court-martial officers over the withdrawal from Afghanistan. (yesterday) Trump wants to intimidate the officer corps into abdicating their oath to the Constitution and substitute an oath of allegiance to Trump personally.
There's nothing subtle or ambiguous about what Trump wants. There's no doubt that his scheme is illegal. No one knows how far the USSC will go to authorize fascism in the US. I hope they will draw the line at authorizing the use of military force to suppress freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.
It's a sorry state of affairs that I say, "hope" because I should know with confidence that the USSC will uphold the law and a couple of hundred years of legal precedent. I'm certain we will find out. I intend to be in the crowd.
We know thing from the first Trump presidency. A large but decreasing size of this country has stripped women of basic rights. To some extent women are more of a chattel class that they were a decade ago. Trump will expect to widen and deepen this class divide. Trump wanted to use the military to quell protests when police became blatantly bigoted in their crime enforcement. That power, previously denied him, is now seriously contested. From bussing to housing to university admittance, expect an increasing class divide based on skin coloration. This divide will, one way or another, have a fear factor of increasing force to broaden and widen class differences. Expect religion and religious affiliation to also collaborate with this perversion of elitism. Right now, the judicial system is in play as republicans continue to block unbiased judicial appointments.
Humanitarian ideals which were ignored and suppressed during the Biden administration will be on the chopping block. Only Trump gets victim status and protection under the law. Only his elites get admitted to his club and get similar exemptions. The price of membership is high and getting higher. Matt Goetz may be anointed to find a replacement for Jeffery Epstein so the club can continue under new management. As always. forward looking statements are subject to revision. We hope a lot of these are revised, but the trend lines and history suggest these probabilities.
Expect and plan for increasing severe and increasingly frequent climate chaos. The effort to decrease Methane emissions have failed, and this potent greenhouse gas is responsible for estimates of climatologists being off in the wrong direction. The problem is getting worse faster than expected. Efforts to contain the problems will certainly be curtailed by Trump and government assistance used as political leverage and unevenly distributed.
Given history and trends, you may even see Trump personally outfitted with a lance and fighting windmills. We may need to build moats with sharks in them to protect our power supply from him. This is improbable, but unfortunately plausible with his second coming. I would have preferred a second coming of Bob Dole.
The Russians are basically telling Trump: We put you in office. Now it’s time for you to pay us back.
I have no idea who Fred Kaplan is but is he really this stupid?
It is reported that Miriam Adelson gave the Trump canpaign 100 million dollars and Elon Musk gave 118 million. These two are Russian agents?
At some point during the four years of "45", I stopped using the term "agent" when ranting to myself or others about certain members of the radical right in our country. I started using the term "asset" instead. And I admitted to myself that the term "agent" refers to clandestine spies during the cold war era, a time eloquently described in historical fiction novels of John LeCarre; the 21st century is different.
What we are faced with now in the 21st century is a global battle between democracies which are fundamentally egalitarian and their foe, those societies that have and are pushing to expand an authoritarian oligarchy/kleptocracy system model. Russia is in the latter category and our country is in some stage of clinging by our fingernails to the former.
In this global competition, countries still use spy agencies to collect information and to plant disinformation. But also national boundaries and the sovereignty of nations are viewed by the authoritarian/oligarchy/kleptocracy countries as mere formalities; quaint notions of the prior century. In this world any political actor in a different country, regardless of formal citizenship, can be an "asset" merely by having the same ultimate goal. You're on the side of either democracy or the other side based on your goals, not your nationality.
Broadly speaking, the goal of the authoritarian/oligarchy/kleptocracy side is to have societies structured to massively concentrate wealth in a tiny fraction of the human population along with concentration of power & control to maintain that imbalance. Broadly speaking, the goal of the democracy movement is to have societies in which the benefits of those societies are shared across all subgroups in the population, in a manner that is sufficiently fair.
The actions of Putin, Musk, Adelson, "45" and much of the R party place them all in the autocracy/oligarchy/kelptocracy camp. Therefore I consider "45", Musk, Adelson, Carlson and many others to be "Russian" assets.
Okay, that was your dumbest comment yet. Are you really that stupid? Have you not taken note of the, shall we say, special relationship between Trump and Putin that has been going on since before Trump ran for president in 2015? And have you missed the news about all the disinformation campaigns Moscow has funded to on Trump's behalf? And all the ways Trump has taken Putin's side over even his own intelligence angencies during his first term? Another comment that clueless will cost you your commenting privileges. I shouldn't have to explain this.
It would have been easy to google 'Patrushev on US campaign' and see what he said in full quote and context:
MOSCOW, November 11. /TASS/. In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.
"The election campaign is over," Patrushev noted. "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them."
He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, "made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration."
"But very often election pledges in the United States can diverge from subsequent actions," he recalled.
Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.
https://tass.com/politics/1870713
"The election campaign is over. To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them."
I’d think that these would be, in order of importance:
1. Tribalist reactionary evangelicals
2. Plutocrats
3. Putin Russians
4. Exasperated American youth desperate for hope and change, even if it now means burning everything down first.
5. Conned suckers and losers
The problem is, Trump has historically had a hard time feeling responsible or obligated from whatever enablers he's had, after he's gotten whatever it was he wanted from them. The Russians did post nudie pics of Melania though. I'm wondering if they've got some of him as well.
Possibly the infamous pee tapes and a huge loan…Duh Donald does like that borrowed money.
Possibly the infamous pee tapes and a huge loan…Duh Donald does like that borrowed money.