Your reading assignment today is by Greg Sargent at The New Republic, Mexican President’s Harsh Takedown of Trump Exposes an Ugly MAGA Scam. Very briefly, Trump is threatening Mexico with a 25 percent tariff on all goods imported from Mexico. This is to “force” Mexico to do something about the migrants and fentanyl from “pouring” into the United States. However, Mexico has already done quite a bit to reduce such border crossings, which is why the apprehensions are way down.

During the campaign, Trump simply pretended none of that was happening. It’s one of MAGA’s biggest deceptions, and his latest scam carries it forward. The very idea that Mexico must be bullied with tariffs into cracking down on migrants is designed to imply that it’s doing nothing right now—it’s taking advantage of us, Trump might say—and only his fearsome threats can force it into submission. …

… All this paves the way for larger deceptions later. Bank on it: The moment Trump takes office, the lower apprehension numbers will magically become real metrics. Fox News will start trumpeting them, and Trump will start claiming the border has achieved pacification due to his strength. Indeed, Trump very well may credit his current threat of tariffs with “forcing” Mexico to make the lower numbers of border crossings a reality.

Trump’s greatest talent, other than self-promotion, is his skill at taking credit for other people’s work. Media let him get away with it, of course. Do read the whole Greg Sarget piece.

Along those lines, see Trump team says Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire deal brokered by Biden is actually Trump’s win.

You probably heard that Jack Smith requested the J6 and documents cases be dismissed. Barbara McQuade says,

In fact, this move could be an effort to keep the cases alive in the long term. An interesting tell in each motion is Smith’s request to dismiss the cases “without prejudice.” That means that the cases can be filed again. By dismissing the cases now on his own terms, Smith blocks Trump’s attorney general from dismissing the cases for all time.

In addition, by filing his motions pre-emptively, Smith was able to explain his reasons for dismissing the case, rather than allowing Trump’s future AG to mischaracterize them. According to Smith, he was dismissing the case not because of the merits or strength of the cases, but because he had to. As Smith explains, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose opinions are “binding” on the special counsel, has concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or criminally prosecuted under the Constitution. OLC reasoned that criminal charges would make it impossible for a president to carry out his constitutional duties in light of the distraction of preparing a criminal defense, the public stigma that would hamper his leadership role and the obstacles prison would impose on his ability to perform his duties.

But Smith was careful to note that this relief from criminal prosecution is “temporary,” and ends when the president leaves office. Smith cites OLC as concluding that this form of immunity for a sitting president “would generally result in the delay, but not the forbearance, of any criminal trial” That is, Trump gets a reprieve, but only during his term in office.

Trump will be lucky if he’s still alive in four years, considering he must be a massive cardio-vascular event waiting to happen.

In transition news, see Trump team signs some, but not all, critical transition documents. In brief, Trump is keeping the sources for his transition funding secret — we know Trump isn’t paying for this out of his own pocket — and also is refusing to request FBI checks of appointees. Trump wants the background checks to wait until he’s inaugurated, so he can control them, apparently.

Try to have a happy Thanksgiving, and put the catastrophe out of your mind for a bit. It’s going to be a long four years.

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.

Today’s reading assignmen — Adam Serwer, The Trump-Trumpist Divide at The Atlantic. It makes the point that most Trump voters were either unaware of or did not take seriously his authoritarian, anti-democratic plans. Their reasons for supporting him went from the stupid to the delusional, and they either didn’t hear or refused to believe the warnings about how dangerous he was.

So Matt Gaetz is out as the AG nominee, and Pam Bondi is in. Bondi has been mentioned in this blog before. Back in 2012 while attorney general of Florida she was on the list of speakers for the RNC National Convention. In 2016 it was noted that she dropped a planned investigation into Trump University after receiving a $25,000 campaign donation from Trump. (The donation came from the Trump Foundation, which was a scandal in itself.) And I wrote this in 2018:

… recently Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Republican and knee-jerk Trump supporter, needed a police escort to leave a movie theater in Tampa because members of the audience were harassing her. (The film was Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which makes this story even better.)

After leaving the AG office in 2019 she chaired Trump’s America First Policy Institute and also was on Trump’s legal team in his first impeachment.  Anyway, the point is that she has long-standing right-wing credentials, she’s open to corruption, and she’s tied herself to Trump. Unlike Gaetz and most of the rest of Trump’s appointees, she does have some experience for the job, so I suspect she’ll have no trouble getting confirmed.

I seriously hope Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard are nixed also. Hegseth was an obviously inappropriate appointee when his name was first announced. Since then, more information has come out that suggests he not only should not be given a job in government; he probably needs to be kept under right surveillance.

Senator Tammy Duckworth explains some of the problems with Hegseth’s appointment here.

And this is from The Guardian:

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, has written in a book that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics.

Hegseth, a former elite soldier turned rightwing Fox television personality, is Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon which controls the gigantic American military – by far the largest armed force in the world.

In one of his five published books he wrote that in the event of a Democratic election victory in the US there would be a “national divorce” in which “The military and police … will be forced to make a choice” and “Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”

Hegseth’s 2020 book exhorts conservatives to undertake “an AMERICAN CRUSADE”, to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents”, to “attack first” in response to a left he identifies with “sedition”, and he writes that the book “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies”.

And of course there’s also the little matter of sexual assault allegations. This guy is pure poison. See also Donald Trump’s Most Dangerous Cabinet Pick by Jonathan Chait and What Pete Hegseth’s Nomination Is Really About by Hanna Rosin at The Atlantic.

There’s such an avalanche of crazy coming out of the “transition” that it’s hard to keep up. But for right now I just want to focus on one small part of what’s going on. Let’s start with Oliver Milman at Mother Jones, Repealing Biden’s Climate Bills Won’t Kill Clean Energy, But It May Cripple US Manufacturing. Milman begins,

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.   …

… Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

See Where the Chips Act Money Has Gone at The Verge for more details into exactly where the new manufacturing investments have flowed so far. Back to Oliver Milman:

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

If Trump kills the program, this would not only erase the jobs that would be funded by the Chips Act. It would also keep American companies reliant on foreign sources for components, including microchips and batteries, that we could be making here. Basically, it would undercut domestic manufacturing on a massive scale and put the U.S. on the road to being one of those shithole countries Trump likes to complain about. Not to mention there are also national security issues regarding being able to provide our own microchips and batteries.

Politico reports that Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo “is aiming to commit nearly every unspent dollar in its $50 billion microchip-subsidy program before President-elect Donald Trump takes over in January, an effort that would effectively cement a massive industrial legacy before the GOP can reverse course.”

The Chips money alone is a massive undertaking. Congress allocated $50 billion in subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing and R&D. So far only two companies have received binding awards from the Department of Commerce’s manufacturing program. To hit her target, Raimondo still needs to nail down contracts with Intel, Micron, Samsung and SK hynix — multibillion-dollar deals that have, at times, been rocky and required renegotiations.

Surely the heads of those companies know the offer will likely be off the table after Trump takes office. But just watch — as manufacturing plants open, Trump will take credit for them.

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 what I’m finding particularly disturbing today:

The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan. 

Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out, and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason, the U.S. official and person with knowledge of the plan said.

It’s not clear to me how solid the sourcing is on this story. No one on Trump’s team will go on the record to confirm it. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

The transition team is looking at the possibility of recalling several commanders to active duty for possible charges, the U.S. official said. 

It’s not clear the Trump administration would pursue treason charges, and instead could focus on lesser charges that highlight the officer’s involvement. “They want to set an example,” said the person with knowledge of the plan….

… Speaking to NBC News days before the election, Howard Lutnick, one of the two advisers leading the transition, said Trump learned after his first administration that he had hired Democratic generals, and he would not make that mistake again. 

Former officials who worked in Trump’s first administration have said they advised Trump against policies they thought would weaken U.S. national security, such as withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria. And they advised against actions that they thought might violate the Constitution or inflame tensions domestically, such as deploying active-duty U.S. troops to quell protests after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd.

I take it “Democratic” generals balked at following Trump’s orders when they were stupid or unconstitutional. A “Republican” general is one who will just follow orders. Okay.

This is about Trump punishing genrals who didn’t defer to him with sufficient servility and obsequiousness. He wants generals who will jump when he says jump. Like the guys who were tried at Nuremberg who were just following orders.

Just the use of the word “treason” tells me the people pursuing this are extremists and fanatics who want to punish someone, not people who are serious about improving the military. There are very high bars for a treason charge. It’s my understanding that treason requires siding with an enemy in a declared war. That doesn’t describe anything that happened in the Afghanistan withdrawal. Note that the feds didn’t try to bring treason charges against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, just espionage charges, because they didn’t think the legal definition of treason could be applied to their case (noting that Ethel probably was innocent).

I hate to think what Trump is going to do to the Defense Department.

I don’t even want to guess what’s going to happen with Trump cabinet picks. I don’t know if Senate Republicans will hang together to approve them all. I don’t know if Congress will roll over and go into recession for more than ten days so that Trump can choose who he wants without hearings. We’ll see.

I do know that pharmaceutical stocks dropped like a rock after RFK the Lesser was announced as Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services. That shouldn’t have surprised anybody; Trump had already said he’s let the Lesser “go crazy” on health.

Obviously, all of Trump’s choices are people who are intended to both be utterly loyal to Trump and to utterly muck up whatever agency or department they are supposed to be running. It’s Trump’s revenge.

In his first term, Trump obviously was unhappy to find out that Presidents can’t just issue orders about whatever and expect people to follow them. He’s never been constrained like that, you know. The only person who could override him was his father, and Fred Trump Sr. has been gone for about 25 years now.

At some point, someone must have told Trump that the powers of the presidency are listed in Article II of the Constitution. So for a while he was obsessed with Article II, claiming it gave him “rights” to do whatever he wanted. He seemed to think he was the first person to find out about it.

But of course, Article II does nothing of the sort. Article II is very short and gives presidents very little autonomous power. Most presidential functions require the cooperation/advice/consent of Congress. And I suspect all the other presidents before Trump knew that. They’d probably actually spent the three minutes or so required to read Article II. But for Trump, hollowing out the bureaucracies that carry out the functions of government is all about revenge. All those Deep State bureaucrats who wouldn’t obey him will be sorry. And since he doesn’t understand how any of this works and what these bureaucrats do, he doesn’t see the downside.

For months, I’ve been reading that European leaders have been making plans for what they will do when they can no longer count on Pax Americana. Well, that time has come, so I understand they’re preparing to defend Europe without our help. But with the likes of Pete Hegseth at DOD and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, we’ll be helpless to defend ourselves before long, never mind help Europe.

Earlier today I read a commentary that said our current allies will stop sharing intelligence with us with Gabbard in charge, and they’ll probably stop trusting intelligence from us. I’m sure you regulars understand how inadequate Gabbard is. But for anyone else floating through here, see Tom Nichols at the Atlantic,  Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is a National-Security Risk.  Gabbard is a big fan of Vladimir Putin, btw.

And then there’s the Israel-Gaza thing. Trump won Michigan with a lot of help from the Muslims in Dearborn. The week before the election, Trump visited a halal cafe in Dearborn and promised to bring peace to Gaza. He didn’t mention he would let Bibi Netanyahu destroy it first, but that is emerging as the plan.

Of all the people in the United States, the president-elect has settled on Mike Huckabee as his nominee for ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist, has said he does not believe in the West Bank as a concept and that it is Judea and Samaria (the biblical name for the region) and that Palestinians as a people are not real. He has also put on campaign events from the West Bank. After Donald Trump’s announcement, Huckabee was asked whether West Bank annexation was possible during the coming presidential term. “Of course,” he replied. (Huckabee is a Christian Zionist, which is to say he believes that Jews should be in Israel—an area he deems to include the West Bank—so as to trigger the Second Coming, after which Christians can inhabit the land.)

Huckabee is but one part of a larger story: In the week or so since he won reelection, Trump has announced a series of people who either explicitly support West Bank settlement or annexation or bristle at the slightest suggestion of criticism of Israel.

As Galen Jackson, an associate professor of political science at Williams College, put it, “To the extent that Israel plans to hold on to the settlements that it builds in the West Bank, then almost by definition annexation has been proceeding for decades on a gradual basis. The main difference with Trump, in that case, is that he doesn’t even protest Israeli settlement expansion or deem it in violation of international law, whereas all other U.S. administrations have.”

Huckabee isn’t the only nominee that the far right Israelis must be thrilled about. Pete Hegseth and Elise Stefanik (nominated for UN Ambassador) have a long record of being all-in on whatever Netanyahu wants.

And there’s a broad consensus that an AG Matt Gaetz will destroy the Department of Justice and burn down the rule of law. Too bad for all those people who voted for Trump because they were afraid of crime.

And I haven’t yet started on what’s going to happen to the economy. But y’all know all that.

I hate election years, but I expect I will hate next year even worse.

I’m out of metaphors to compare to Trump’s picks for his cabinet and administration. They’ve all been bad. But this afternoon, when I saw a headline that said Trump wants Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard to be national intelligence director, I saw the English language itself surrender. There are no words.

Trump has been asking for the new Congress to go into recess as soon as it is sworn in, so that he can hire his people through recess appointments. No hearings; no embarassing questions, no votes. Right now I’m hearing some Republican senators say they are looking forward to hearings. Axios is reporting that Republicans are “stunned and disgusted” at the Gaetz appointment. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t fall in line and vote to confirm the appointment. He may not get his recess appointments, though. It’s possibly a good sign that John Thune will be Senate Majority Leader, and not Trump’s pick, Rick Scott. Scott had promised to give Trump everything Trump wants.

As far as Trulsi Gabbard is concerned, I second Fred Kaplan at Slate.

As I keyboard this the Senate race in Pennsylvania between Dem. Bob Casey and Rep. Dave McCormick is still too close to call. But it probably will be called by the end of the day. Control of the House is not yet called, but the Republicans are a lot closer to the finish line than the Dems.

Trying to access Will Bunch’s column at the Philadelphia Inquirer without a subscription is getting trickier, but I found a gift link to his most recent column on Threads. Try it if you hit the paywall. Highly recommended reading — 2024’s other big loser? The mainstream media. Is there any path forward? I’m starting in the middle here, after a description of how the old traditional news media are struggling to stay afloat financially these days.

And while newsroom leaders were getting a lesson (or, in many cases, not getting it) that balanced-but-bloodless journalism that equalized “both sides” would eventually drive both sides away, it’s also fair to ask whether this head-on crash between journalism and increasingly tribal ideologies even mattered that much in the end. The perfect-storm fluke of mid-20th-century media monopolies that the late David Halberstam famously described as The Powers That Be have been zapped by the electrons of the internet, creating other ways for folks to speak to each other on social media or read targeted websites that appealed to their niche interests and ideas or their prejudices.

But especially their prejudices. …

… The things that pundits have been talking about since Tuesday — an economy that hasn’t worked for the working class since the time of Ronald Reagan, anxieties among white voters about a potential end to white privilege and the patriarchy, and a Democratic Party that’s lost touch with the great American middle — all factored into this election. But nothing mattered more than this: Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.

Ultimately, it may not have mattered how brilliant Kamala Harris’s campaign was or how well crafted her proposals. Most voters saw little to none of it. They were stuck in a right-wing media bubble or getting information from other ignorant people on social media.  And they have absolutely no idea what they’ve just done.

I honestly don’t think the current Democratic party has lost touch with the American middle class, btw. The party worked hard to address middle-class issues. It’s Trump and his minions who don’t give a hoo haw about the American middle class or what it’s like to be a middle class American.

The problem with most Americans only hearing the right-wing side of political discourse has been going on for many years. I remember despairing about it during the George W. Bush years, and it was an old problem even then. I like what Bunch says about “balanced-but-bloodless journalism that equalized ‘both sides.'” A lot of this goes back to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on news media being biased toward liberals that went on to become gospel on the American Right. The news media establishment responded to the criticism by sacrificing accurate reporting in order to avoid the appearance of favoritism to liberals.

Paul Krugman addressed this in a column he wrote more than 24 years ago that’s worth reading again now. In Reckonongs, Bait and Switch, he described some blatant lies being told by George W. Bush in 2000 as he campaigned against Al Gore.

How has he gotten away with it? One answer is that voters can’t relate to big numbers. But it’s also true that the media haven’t helped them make sense of these numbers.

Partly this is a matter of marketing — insider gossip makes better TV than budget arithmetic. But there has also been a political aspect: the mainstream media are fanatically determined to seem evenhanded. One of the great jokes of American politics is the insistence by conservatives that the media have a liberal bias. The truth is that reporters have failed to call Mr. Bush to account on even the most outrageous misstatements, presumably for fear that they might be accused of partisanship. If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ”Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.” After all, the earth isn’t perfectly spherical.

Mainstream media refused to change course and became mostly useless as a means ot informing the public about political candidates. And now that the pre-Nixon press has retired or expired, everyone working in news media today has been well trained to produce artifically “balanced” but bloodness reporting. And here we are.

Democrats must stop assuming that they can get their message to the people through mainstream media. That hasn’t been true for a very long time. I remember I used to complain that President Obama was making that same mistake, assuming media would accurately explain what his administration was doing and why it was doing it. It did not. He was lucky that Mitt Romney was a less ruthless candidate than Trump, or Obama wouldn’t have been re-elected.

I believe I linked to this before, but it fits here too — at Talking Points Memo, Kate Riga says that the Dems really must develop their own media to talk to the people. “Democrats need well-produced, well-funded, compelling content that can go punch for punch with the Rogans and the Theo Vons.” she said.

See also Reckonings of Contempt by Josh Marshall. And the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for McCormick.

Heather Cox Richardson began her November 8 newsletter this way:

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. 

Yes, reporters are now covering that information. Why wasn’t it covered starting many weeks before the election?

One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. 

I’ve lost the link, but yesterday I read that a lot of consumer product companies are planning to stuff their U.S. warehouses with their Chinese-made products or components as fast as possible before the tariffs are imposed. But even if they are thinking of moving their manufacturing to the U.S., it’s going to take awhile to get new facilities up and running. In the meantime, consumers are going to get slammed.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s Chips and Science Act was already bringing much of manufacturing back to these shores without adding to inflation. I suspect most voters never heard of the Chips and Science Act. Now companies are scrambling to get Chips and Science Act deals finalized before the new Congress can repeal it. Whatever happens, next year Trump will take credit for the new jobs being created by Biden’s policies. There will be little reporting to correct the lie.

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” 

In the last post I discussed the failures of media. There is more commentary on those failures now. Let’s begin with Michael Tomasky at The New Republic. I recommend reading the whole thing. Here is his basic premise:

Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

I agree with him. It’s particularly obvious whenever mainstream reporters interview Democrats. The questions will all reflect right-wing media framing of the issues. Consider the interview of Kamala Harris by CNN’s Dana Bash, of which I wrote,

I started to watch that CNN interview with Dana Bash, but bailed before it was over because the questions were stupid. It was all “gotcha” (Why did you flip flop on fracking?) or bits of right-wing talking points, re-framed as questions. Instead of asking about her energy policies, Bash tries to trip her up by grilling her for changing a position on fracking. As a viewer, I found that annoying and tiresome. If I were the candidate I’d be frustrated also.

As for news coverage, even those who tune in to the standard network nightly news or scan the front page of a newspaper wouldn’t have been told anything substantive about Trump’s vs. Harris’s positions on the issues. But now reporters are shifting into “what to expect in the new Trump administration” mode, so they’re finally explaining what Trump’s tariffs are likely to do to inflation. Thanks loads, guys.

And Dan Froomkin at Press Watch echoes what Michael Tomasky wrote. Just go read it. See also Kate Riga at TPM. Mainstream media is doing an absolutely terrible job of informing news consumers about the issues and candidates’ policies, as opposed to the horse race and what nasty thing one of them said about the other that day. And the issues are being entirely framed by right-wing propaganda rather than actual facts.

Signs of the times — Trump is, apparently, refusing to agree to the standard ethics code regarding conflicts of interest, which is holding up the transition process.

While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Since Mr. Trump created his transition team in August, it has refused to participate in the normal handoff process, which typically begins months before the election.

It has missed multiple deadlines for signing required agreements governing the process. That has prevented Mr. Trump’s transition team from participating in national security briefings or gaining access to federal agencies to begin the complicated work of preparing to take control of the government on Jan. 20, 2025.

Not that he abided by the “conflicts of interest” codes in his first term. Now I take it he doesn’t want to be constrained by having to pretend he’s not using the power of office to advance his personal interests.

CNN reported that Pentagon officials are actively discussing what to do if Trump issues an illegal order, such as shooting peaceful protesters Trump doesn’t like. They’re also anticipating he will fire the top brass and replace them with his flunkies.