Updates on Our Slow-Motion Apocalypse

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First off, Jeffrey Goldberg released the Signal group chat, which clearly discussed plans for bombing in Yemen. So the other participants who claimed there were no war plans or anything that should have been classified in the chat were, um, fibbing. This is a gift link, so you can read it all without a subscription to The Atlantic.

A lawsuit has already been filed regarding SignalGate. Trump officials were sued yesterday by the government watchdog group American Oversight. And the suit has been assigned to none other than the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, James Boasberg. Yep; the same guy Trump’s lawyers are butting heads with over the deportation flights. See Trump’s Nightmare Judge Will Decide Case on War Plans Group Chat at The New Republic.

For the latest in the deportation flights court brawl, see A Constitutional Collision In Slow Motion by David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo. In brief, the DoJ lawyers have taken the position that the Trump Administration doesn’t have to comply with the Court’s information requests, nyah nyah nyah.

The next step in this matter isn’t exactly clear to me. The ball is now in Boasberg’s court, with the administration adamant that there are no grounds to hold it in contempt while refusing to recognize the judge’s authority to inquire into the matter. Something’s got to give.

In other news, a Democrat is the projected winner of a Pennsylvania state senate election yesterday. This is newsworthy because the district hasn’t elected a Democratic state senator since it moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster County in 1979. Trump won there last November with 57 percent of the vote. I’m reading that even though it was a state race, the winner, James Malone, made Elon Musk and recent events in Washington a central part of his campaign. A sign of things to come?

Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times that Trump and Musk Are Suffering From Soros Derangement Syndrome. This is my last NY Times gift article for the month, so enjoy. Bouie writes that Trump, Musk, and the political Right genuinely believe that all opposition to their cause is being fueled and manipulated by powerful elites (like George Soros). Just about everything Trump has been doing lately has been about striking down the institutions and “shadowy” government agencies that are behind this manipulation. Eliminate these elites, and the opposition will vanish. Right?

One upshot of the idea that there is no such thing as genuine popular political opposition to Trump and the MAGA right — and that most, if not all of it, is the product of secret machinations by elusive billionaires and shadowy government agencies — is that the people are inherently on your side and your opponents are illegitimate. The other is that to defeat your opposition, all you have to do is strike at the individuals and institutions that fuel it. Remove them, and you’ll have no one in your way.

We see both conclusions at work in the way the president and his supporters are operating.

So, in brief, the Right is dismissing all the blinking red warnings that their attacks on portions of government — like Social Security — are really pissing off regular Americans, including many of their own voters, and are not the work of George Soros paying people to yell a lot at town halls.

Probably as part of this effort, yesterday Trump signed an executive order demanding big changes in how elections are held. The headline provision is that people must provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote. It’s not clear to me if this applies to people who are already registered. But what is clear is that an executive order by a POTUS is not binding on state governments, and states run elections, per the Constitution.

Another provision in this order is that it bans certain election equipment that use QR codes. I don’t know if that would include Dominion or Smartmatic machines. But it might force a lot of states to spend a ton of money replacing equipment, if the states decided to comply.

But my favorite provision is that it would allow the Lost Boys of DOGE to comb through voter registration rolls to find the “bad” voters. Entire Democratic-leaning voting districts would probably be declared dead. See Steve Benen at MSNBC.

14 thoughts on “Updates on Our Slow-Motion Apocalypse”

  1. I just watched a few minutes of the Mouth of Sauron (White House Press Secretary) fielding questions from reporters on this.  Has to turn the TV off to avoid vomiting.

      • Yeah, Karoline Leavitt. Today after responding to several good questions with BS/lies, she got impatient and pivoted to talking about how (in their fantasy world) the operation was so massively successful taking the fight to the Houthis, in contrast with how the Biden administration (in her characterization) let the Houthis "run wild" for four years.
        I looked it up and over the course of 2024 there were at least "931 American and British airstrikes against [Houthi] sites in Yemen. 

        There's more to the history than just that, but it gets into the grey area where the US had an explicit goal of avoiding having the Israel-Hamas war spill over into a major regional conflict. Also, in 2023 the Houthis were disrupting the shipping through the Red Sea (and Suez Canal) which was a big problem for many nations around the world; and therefore the goal of the 2024 campaign against the Houthis was focused on degrading their capability to disrupt shipping through the Red Sea.

        This administration seems to be engaged in major time spent on gaslighting the American people.

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  3. Up the river we go, on a mission.  In the movie Apocalypse Now, the mission was strange, as a part of the military had gone a bit feral and was fighting wild, out of the range and control of its organizational structure.  This Apocalypse differs slightly as the feral group that is out of control is at the mouth of the river, not way upstream.   Right now, its leader, thinks he is being hunted as a witch, a common delusion of his.  He is wildly casting out tariffs in what appears an attempt to throw off the witch hunting party that is out to get him.  In the meantime, his wife is trying to sell her wedding dress on Ebay according to a NYT story.  It may be news that they deem fit to print, but not, to me at least, fit to read.  Transactional to them is good and other Trannies are evil.  Manichaeism, dates to the third century in the current era, but they do not even know of Mani.  All they know is that its good v. evil thing fits their primitive morality.  Knowing which trannies are good or bad is tough enough for them.  How to keep state secrets is way too hard to understand.  Too many rules and strange devices to learn which cramps their style and makes their brain hurt.  

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  4. "Trump, Musk, and the political Right genuinely believe that all opposition to their cause is being fueled and manipulated by powerful elites (like George Soros)"

    Yes the entire GOP has been operating in alignment with the Breitbart comment section for years now. This is what happens when an entire political party lives exclusively in a propaganda bubble. At some point it will be their undoing I just hope they don't get us all killed in the meantime!

  5. God bless America.  Now we will all get to justify our existence to a boatload of bigger fools. 

    I'm so tired of this show. 

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    • Please send a list of 5 things that you did today to glorify Dear Leader. Those who do not comply will face rendition to a s*ithole 3rd world prison with no avenue for due process.

      Thank you for our cooperation.

  6. In relation to WaryTales note on "Transational=Corrupt"…

    I was reading the polling data over at Civiqs for "how is the economy now" and when you look at the results for GOPers as opposed to the aggregate, there is a (well known) disconnect where, the GOPers tell the pollster how they feel the economy is going based on, what I assume is, the emotional bias that they have towards the party in power. The GOPers always say that the economy is very bad under democrats and very good under GOPers and it seems that they let their emotions get in the way of answering a question honestly. As a non-party member, I thought the economy was great under "sleepy joe" and that the outlook was great based on the fact that I could plan my business effectively based on the current and past economic conditions. Now, not so much, but not because I dont like the orange guy, but because the GOP policy is bad and chaotic. And, with this polling evidence, they just lie and lie to themselves.

    Now, that being said, I see that this goes down to the interpersonal… I do business with a lot of people who LOVE the orange man. These are the ones I have trouble trusting because of their transactional behavior. They must ALWAYS win in a zero-sum way. And, they are the ones that I see their emotions get in the way because the get butt-hurt when they perceive that they are not having a total and complete 100% WIN. In short, transactionalism to me means that I am dealing with a broken human incapable of dealing with normal human emotions such as making a business agreement that might have hard self-control, self-sacrifice, compromise work built in without dopamine-fueled win after win. Half of our country are emotional nitwits. I guess this leads to corruption, though, because the desire have a zero-sum win at all costs is an emotional roller-coaster that leads to cooking the books.

    The daddy party is the party that, as a simile, gets drunk and throws the TV at their family out of anger because a person of color is featured on a Pepsi commercial because they are incapable of expressing normal human emotions in normal ways.

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