I’ve noticed a lot of talk about 2004. After G.W. Bush won re-election he talked expansively about his “political capital” and how he was going to spend it. And he spent it promoting his stupid scheme to privatize Social Security, which flopped miserably and set the stage for a huge Dem win in the 2006 midterms. Many fingers are now being crossed the next couple of years will be a similar story.
The two headlines that stood out for me today were both at WaPo. One is Trump is coming for the executive branch. Does he know what he’s doing? by Dan Balz. The subhead is “The president-elect has signaled he will be destructive, but he seems motivated by retribution rather than saving money.” Seems? A WaPo headline from yesterday said Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election. I understand Smith is dismantling his team and plans to leave before Trump is sworn in, so Trump may not get to fire him. The subhead to that story is “The plans show how president-elect Donald Trump wants to use the Justice Department to address his own personal grievances.”
I don’t doubt he intends to use massive amounts of government resources trying to prove the 2020 election was stolen from him. That brings me to the other headline from today, Pam Bondi, Trump’s AG pick, said ‘prosecutors will be prosecuted.’
Bondi said the Justice Department’s special counsel investigation into whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian interference in the 2016 election needed to be dissolved. She declared that the 45th president’s first impeachment in 2019 was a “sham.” And when Trump was indicted four times after leaving office, Bondi was blunt about who deserved legal scrutiny — and it wasn’t the former president.
“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Bondi declared on Fox News in 2023, soon after Trump’s fourth set of criminal charges. “The investigators will be investigated.”
You might recall that the 2020 election was already investigated up the wazoo. But maybe now Trump has found people who will fabricate new evidence. Whether this will turn out to be Privatization 2.0 probably depends on how it gets covered by the media, however. In other words, don’t count on it.
Here’s a rather alarming story I’ve seen only in Rolling Stone, for example — Trump Refuses to Disclose Who Is Funding His Transition, by Peter Wade. I knew about some of this, but not all of it.
True to character, Donald Trump is already flouting ethics laws and norms even before he takes office as president in 2025. The president-elect is accepting secret donations to fund his transition while refusing to sign ethics pledges or deliver an ethics plan mandated by the Presidential Transitions Act. The transition also has not signed an agreement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that would allow the agency to do background checks on Trump nominees.
The transition has missed deadlines in September and October despite transition team leaders Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon promising to sign memorandums of understanding with the Biden White House that would facilitate the outgoing administration’s collaboration with Trump’s transition team. According to The New York Times, the Trump transition has privately created an ethics code and conflict-of-interest guidance for transition staff, but those documents do not include a legal requirement — a statement regarding how Trump will handle conflicts of interest while in office. ,,,
… Historically, presidential transitions — including Trump’s 2016 transition — have signed an agreement to receive financial assistance from the General Services Administration, which is responsible for monitoring the transition process. By accepting the funds and signing the agreement, transitions are agreeing to abide by certain conditions that would limit individual donations to $5,000 and mandate transparency regarding donors. Without disclosing donors, foreign influence is also a concern since there are no restrictions on international donations to transitions, unlike presidential campaigns. …
… Instead of allowing the F.B.I. to investigate Trump administration nominees’ backgrounds, the transition is conducting private background checks. According to CNN, Trump and his acolytes believe that the F.B.I.’s process is too slow and could get in the way of the work Trump wants to do to implement his agenda. Sources told CNN that behind closed doors, Trump has questioned whether background checks are necessary.
Are we alarmed yet?
And then there are the DOGE boys, Musk and Ramaswamy, who are supposed to be in charge of “government efficiency.” See Matt Ford at The New Republic, The More You Learn About Elon Musk’s DOGE, the Less Sense It Makes. They’re merrily taking a sledgehammer to government bureaucracy. Right now they’re working on smashing muc of the regulatory system and firing the workers maintaining that system. I understand their long-term plans include gutting things like housing assistance (which might put me out of my home) and Medicaid, which among other things pays for most old folks in long-term care facilities. How that goes over with the public may depend on how widely the pain is spread. A lot of the damage done might not be evident right away.
The mass deportations could get very ugly and messy and could cause concern among the not-deported. And the anticipated hit on the economy, especially food prices, should be noted. The bleeping Trump had damn well better notice. And we’ll see how much damage he does with tariffs.
Let's look at "political capitol" and the "mandate." There is no "mandate" and no "landslide." Trump, when the final count is in, won with LESS than 50% of the vote. He won by about the same number as he lost with in 2020. Fewer people showed up to vote for Harris than voted for Biden. Mandate my ass! "Political capital" is a bit more tricky. Republicans in Congress do not want to get on Trump's shit list. But they have not rolled over – so far the GOP Senate majority is not crazy about becoming a fully-owned subsidiary of the White House. At least three members of the Senate told Matt to stuff it in defiance of Trump. (and Gaetz removed himself.)
Trump retribution is part of his make-up. He talked about it in 2016. It's entirely possible that NY will put Trump's sentencing on hold until 2029 and GA will wait on the 2020 election interference case until 2029. With both, I see an implicit threat – if Trump retaliates against either state from the federal position he holds, it could become evidence and a factor in sentencing. Trump would like to gin up some official conclusion that he's totally innocent. In his mind, this "proof" will be a magic wand that makes any state charges (which Trump and Company can't immunize themselves against) must go away. IMO, Trump has considered that he's gonna violate federal and state laws like Al Capone. Getting away with it afterward worries him and probably a lot of his cronies.
If Bondi and Trump bring charges against their perceived enemies (and I think Trump will demand it) Trump will also gloat about it publicly. When the case is dismissed fo lack of evidence, I think there will be grounds to file a defamation suit against Bondi and Trump that will put Bondi in the poorhouse next to Guilani. These suits have taken down Alex Jones. The case(s) brought by E. Jean Carrol may cost Trump $100 million. Using the machinery of the federal government to defame HRC, the Obamas, Liz Cheney, Jack Smith, the NY prosecutor, the GA prosecutor…. And if they each collect around $100 million, that will put a serious dent in Trump's pocketbook even if he's granted himself and everyone else a federal pardon.
Re the Rolling Stone article, I suspect the law clearly sets up a requirement but nobody considered including a penalty if the incoming POTUS refuses to comply. In a sane world, the Senate would not consider someone who refuses to commit to an ethics pledge and the Cheif Justice would not swear in a POTUS who did not uphold the law related to maintaining ethical standards in the transfer of power. In a san world. I agree that Biden should refuse to facilitate the transition if Trump violates the law related to the transition.
The biggie is whether or not the military will follow illegal orders to suppress opponents of Trump by force. I do not think the USSC will authorize it but I have been wrong about the high court before. I don't think Trump cares if the USSC approves or not, as long as the Generals at the Pentagon roll the tanks to occupy NYC and Chicago. The USSC has no enforcement mechanism if DOJ and the Pentagon ignore the court's decision. I think Trump is betting the farm on a military coup and I don't think Trump will moderate other lawless acts until he KNOWS if the Army commanders will ignore their oath to the Constitution. Trump may be halfway through his term before the High Court hands down a decision. Trump has too much "stuff" to do to wait out this crucial aspect of the gambit.. So Trump will be up to his neck in broken laws (I think) before he finds out if he can pull off a violent coup.
DOGE is smoke and mirrors for the work Project 2025 has already done. It's all about castrating the regulatory power of the federal government and I think every page of what Trump will rescind is determined. Trump wants to say that it's the genius of these billionaires that led the way.
Yeah, the US economy will take a hit with Tariffs and then with an essential part of the workforce being deported or being in hiding (and not working.) IMO, Team Trump anticipates that if free and fair elections are held in 2028, they will be out of power. Again, if Trump can't call out the military to intimidate voters who know they are the victims of policies that only benefit the ultra-rich, all the crap they dumped will get removed by Democrats over the next decade they are in power.
The mass deportations could get messy.
Not to worry, just because vast swaths of US agriculture and food processing industries will have no workers, and the construction industry grinds to a halt. /sarc.
We've laughed at this guy for years, but I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes key to any efforts to counter Trump:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/republican-rand-paul-opposes-trump-175912864.html
It won't happen that way. Trump will go after the sanctuary cities long before even mentioning the food industry or construction. The big corps will send bags of money to Trump to make sure that they are protected.
The play is to send immigration officers into a sanctuary city and demand that the "illegals" be handed over. When the city refuses to co-operate, send the Army into the city to force the matter.
The resulting protests will be massive, further justifying more force. The state police and national guard under the governor's orders may even end up fighting the Army directly on the streets of the city. It will be a huge mess.
Remember Portland in his first term? The right was screaming that it was a lawless hell hole during the BLM protests and troops needed to be sent in. Which was simply not true – any lawless aspect was instigated by the police and right-wing militias in Portland.
He's itching to shoot protestors for their defiance during BLM in 2020. The food industry will be way down the priority list. The sanctuary cities already will be rubble before then.
People stupid or mean enough to vote for these clowns will simply need to feel the pain their selfish policies will inflict – it's the main way they learn. If Trump passes his tariffs, this will trigger inflation, and this will bite his MAGA followers, causing them to lose faith.
If I were living in subsidized housing on a tight budget, I'd be scared. All of us have to find ways to make additional income.
I hope Jack Smith is making copies of his team's work, and is stashing it in a place Pam Bondi will never find.
It's going to be especially galling if / when Trump pardons the Jan 6 insurrectionists serving in prison. Ruth Ben-Ghiat says that Jan 6 will be glorified among the MAGAs as the foundation event for their "cause".
I have heard (from the psychics) that Elon Musk will be getting his US citizenship fast-tracked, much like Melania got in on an Einstein exemption. In other words, games will be played. Elon is like Trump, they're both sociopaths who want unchecked power.
The DOGE thing is just a scam, a way for Elon to get more money and power for himself. And Ramaswamy needs to be relevant somehow.
If Wiki is correct Musk has been a US citizen since 2002. I cannot see him neglecting something like that.
We see this transition as a mess as do many. Recent news reports indicate that those doing the transition are acting like it is even a bigger mess than we see it from our point of view. Meetings and decision making is highly argumentative and chaotic as best according to reports. This should be a surprise to no one. The common element of the transition team is a commitment to hate and divisiveness. Disorder, disagreement, and discontent are the names of their game. A cast of hardheaded haters yields no harmony.
Their picks will inevitably cause chaos and even more argumentation and division. No one will win and no one will accept compromise so all will lose in the end. It will be like Israel and Palestine, both sides losing and losing. In the long run who will have any chance of any title other than the bigger loser. So too, this title might carry the higher honor if there is any to be had.
The trend is to tune out and turn inward. It seems the best path while they fight for fighting's sake. Yes, their fight is against an internal enemy, but their internal enemy they will find is each other as we already see.
I'm going to explore some John Rawls and other authors with a better vision of the future. Create an inner island of peace while they self-destruct. It is their destiny and need not be ours. Let them prey on each other to feed their hate fetish.
And the horror goes on and on.
"Yes, their fight is against an internal enemy, but their internal enemy they will find is each other as we already see."
We build from the bottom up in harmony.
Tom Friedman has an article in the NYT today with quite good points. Read it if you are tough enough. It inspired this response from California:
The stakes in this horror story are really high. I'd say Angharad has the big picture.
I hope that when Homan and his goons are going into workplaces to haul off undocumented workers they are reminded that the other criminals are those who hired them in the first place. It's just as illegal for the undocumented to work in the US as it is for the managers who hire them. As long as they are ignored we know what this mass deportation is really about, and it isn't "immigration."
The transition in 2016 was *way* messier. Nobody expected Trump to win – including even Trump himself – so there was absolutely no planning at all until after election day. Trump put Chris Christie in charge of making lists of potential appointees, then threw away the lists.
Trump found a few traditional GOP managers who passed his [personal] loyalty test, but none of them lasted long. Remember, at that point, the was no "bench" of established Trumpist Republicans; the old Big Money wing of the Party controlled the Party bureaucracy *and* [almost?] all elected GOP politicians.
The problem Trump faces now is to figure out which "Trumpists" Republicans are truly loyal to him rather than merely faking it (to avoid losing Primaries). This is complicated by the fact that to be a good manager, one needs to be a good judge of character, which rules out anybody who is personally loyal to Trump.
The transition is proceeding *much* more quickly and smoothly now (than in 2016-7), but the results will be similar: chaos in the Executive Branch.
I'm still predicting that the first big Bill passed by the next Congress will be More Tax Cuts for the Rich, but I'm now hedging my because they might pass a "Build The Wall" bill first, for cover.
"A WaPo headline from yesterday said Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election. I understand Smith is dismantling his team and plans to leave before Trump is sworn in, so Trump may not get to fire him."
*** *** ***
If I were Jack Smith, I would grab my passport and immediately move to a new residence in The Hague. There, I would submit the entire Trump report, unedited, to the International Criminal Court.
Comment from the WaPo on the DOJ:
The 'for profit' privatization of everything, then? The Law of Moses does not recognize that system. Nor does that Law recognize the 'public'ization' of everything, either. Want to know why the Law of Moses does not recognize either of these systems? Here's at least two whole sets of deep reasons why:
SET 1=====
1. The general, or 'masculine', cosmos and…the special, or 'feminine', Earth (Gen 1:1);
2. The Earth, as its own general subject, and its…special kind of material wealth: its abiding maximal abundance of open liquid water (v. 2);
3. That water, in general, and its…special cycling (the water cycle, vs. 3-10);
4. The water cycle, in general, and its…special beneficiaries: biological life (vs. 11-12);
5. Biological life, in general, and its…special category, animal biology (vs. 20-25);
6. Animals, in general, and its…special category, humans (plant/animal/mineral/physics) (vs. 26-29);
7. The general human and the…special kind of human: woman (Genesis 2:7-25).
SET 2=====
This seven-fold recursive pairing is itself 'married' to the fact that there are ONLY FIVE names that Genesis 1 reports that God gives, respectively, to only five things. For, these five things at least *seem* to be the Earth's own prime three dynamic, feminine subsystems for handling its own portion of the Sun's energy for sake of life on Earth:
(i) of continual regular rotation of the Earth, which moderates the 'directional' radiation for all parts of the Earth (Gen 1:4-5);
(ii) the Earth's atmosphere, which further moderates that radiation to the surface (Gen 1:6-8);
(iii) the continual thermal exchange of land and sea, and of the air above each, all of which constitutes the thermal moderating system of Earth (apart from it's rotation) (Gen 1: 9-10).
Continued from my initial comment above:
And that's only the beginning of that issue (of life, the Earth, and of the basic male-and-female bond. Consider:
Can a Star Trek-like holo-deck provide us humans a true cosmology? Is the most God-honor kind of story of cosmic origins one that told from 'outside the cosmos, from an, 'omniscient', 'transcendent' frame of reference? Henry Morris and various others seem to think so. For, they claim that Genesis 1 begins explicitly—not of any self-evidently specifically life-centric thing—-, but, rather, of cosmogonical physics, such as 'unformed' mere matter and empty space.
So, some modern Christians think Genesis 1:1 does not explicitly concern a general cosmos of stars and a special Earth, but, rather, of a presentation of physics that does not self-evidently even suggest a life-firming fine-tuning of ACTUAL physics. This may be likened to a group of persons intent of taking, by force, an ideal and beautiful farm-based Estate and, after bulldozing most the farm and house, putting in its place a truly massive 'greasy auto garage' with one very small, very crude cot in the back office. And, even the reception area at the front of this monstrosity is a very cramped and bare affair for the clients, but a truly comforting thing behind the reception desk for the receptionist.
In fact, of the 'Christian' model of Genesis 1 that advocates a 'physics'-centric 'exegesis', some claim that even the word 'water' in v. 2, 6-7 are NOT a concern for actual water, but, rather, are mere adjectives for the 'plasma' state of reductive mere matter (https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j21_3/j21_3_69-76.pdf).
So, Without any planet even remotely like the Earth (liveable), the 'glorious' science-fictional Star Trek space ships would be just hunks of wonder-sapping prisons. Indeed, consider, in the first Star Wars movie, that Luke Skywalker, upon seeing the Millennium Falcon, exclaims, 'What a piece of junk!', and to which Han Solo retorts, 'She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts.' Luke was right.
Of course, Luke was far more right that he knew. For, he was only contrasting one stupid space to 'better' ones. Nevertheless, with never anything like an open-air planet to live on, we would find ourselves, at best, confined to a spaceship until we arrived, knowingly, at some such planet. For, if there never was any such planet that we knew about, then, even a holo-deck image of such a planet would, at best, be assumed to be a weird fiction about which, at best, to conceptually pine. Imagine:
'My darling, your face is like a bulkhead. Sorry, Darling, I gotta go maintain the ship's life-support systems, so we don't die from sudden complete failure of some of those systems. I know you need more oxygen to stop feeling horrible. That's one of the systems that's been breaking down lately. And we have too little resources to keep it running properly for more than an hour a… —what's a day again? 28 hours? I keep forgetting, because I don't get enough oxygen to keep track of such arbitrary measurements.'
I think you have the wrong blog. Are you taking your medication?
This is way off topic for this blog. We don’t do biblical anything here. You may want to comment somewhere else.