A (or One) Skeptic

With every day that passes I can feel my heart hardening. With every deliberate cruelty, many of them cheered on by Trump’s MAGA supporters, my heart is just getting less and less flexible.

For all the farmers, and truck drivers, and mechanics, and carpenters, and construction workers, and salespeople, and miners, and machinist, and factory worker, and welder and assembler, and yes, also the nurses and teachers who voted for Trump, I say fuck ‘em.

For all the good people in Wyoming, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Idaho, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Nebraska, the twelve states that voted in the highest percentages for Trump, I say fuck ‘em.

And we’re only 24 days into the Trump administration. We still have 1436 days to go.

Imagine how I’m going to feel after another 1436 days of putting up with this asshole.

Another 1436 days of this abject cruelty.

The United States is obviously very fractured, completely bifurcated at the moment. But it’s going to get much, much worse. I’m really not sure  how we’re going to manage this, with two sets of people who just detest each other. 

It is well known among marriage researchers that the most corrosive thing you can feel for your partner is contempt. And at the moment, I’m feeling a lot of contempt for the supporters of Donald Trump. Many of them are going to suffer quite badly when the full consequences of Trump’s actions hit home.

And I’m not going to care.

Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.

Donald Trump is nuts.

I realize I’m not really breaking new ground here, but just the other day at the “Super Bowl” interview, he said that he was “serious” about making Canada the 51st state.

Oh boy.

He’s also said that he wants to “buy” Greenland and have the United States take “ownership” of the Gaza Strip so that he can redevelop it.

Oh boy oh boy.

If Joe Biden had said any of these things, we’d be getting him ready for a nursing home, or at least for an assisted living facility. Let’s look at these in turn.

Greenland

Of all of Trump’s proposals, this one is the least verkackt. The problem with buying Greenland is, of course, that Greenland is not for sale. Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. It has significant self-governing powers but not (yet) full independence. It’s not even clear whom one would have to buy Greenland from.

With very significant natural resources — the reason that Trump wants it — Greenland also has no reason to want to be sold. We’d be much better off forming alliances with Greenland and offering them assistance in extracting those natural resources (although that might create various environmental concerns) than offering to buy it.

The Gaza Strip

The Gaza Strip is a disputed and complex territory with no widely recognized sovereign government, and is currently part of the Palestinian territories. It can be considered both “occupied” or “blockaded,” depending on which international law theory one applies. There is no mechanism for the United States to take “ownership” of the Gaza Strip. Russia and, for that matter, China would have just as much right to take “ownership” of the Gaza Strip as the United States.

Trump wants to ship all the displaced Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan. However, they don’t want them. And Trump can’t force them to accept them.

Most significantly, the Gaza Strip has been the source of a 75 year blood feud, and Trump wants to deposit the United States in the middle of it. So that he can develop a “riviera” on the Mediterranean coast. (Btw, Lebanon used to be the Mediterranean “Riviera” before its civil war, and we can see how that worked out.)

Canada

Of all the things that Trump has proposed, this one is the most ridiculous. Canada is a parliamentary democracy that is still part of the Commonwealth of Nations. The United States is technically a federal republic with a presidential system of government (where the president serves as both head of state and head of government). This is completely different from Canada. Also, with its ten provinces, Canada would be unlikely to become the “51st” state, but more likely the 51st through 61st states. In order for Canada to become one or more states, the following would have to happen:

1. Canada Would Have to Seek Statehood

• The Canadian government (or its provinces individually) would need to initiate the process, likely through a national plebiscite and a vote in its Parliament.
• The Canadian Constitution would need to be amended to allow such a move, which would require approval from both the House of Commons and the Senate, plus the consent of the individual provinces.

2. U.S. Congress Would Have to Approve Statehood

• Canada’s government (or each individual province) would have to petition Congress to become a state.
• Congress would have to pass an Enabling Act, which would authorize Canada or individual provinces to draft a state constitution. Each province seeking admission would have to hold a constitutional convention.
• The U.S. Congress would have to pass a joint resolution approving Canada’s admission (majority vote required in both the House and the Senate).
• The President of the United States would have to sign the resolution, officially admitting the new state or states.

You can imagine how long this would take. Under the best of circumstances, this would take much longer than Trump’s presidency would last. There’s a good chance that Trump would be six feet under before something like this could ever be finalized.

But now consider the motivations:  why would Canada want to become part of the United States? They have a completely different political culture, and they would gain nothing through a union like this.

And why would the United States want to merge with Canada? We have a completely different political culture, and adding 10 new states (provinces) would shift our national politics significantly to the left. Certainly Republicans don’t want that.

The entire rationale for Canada becoming the “51st state” is that Trump doesn’t like the fact that we’re running a trade deficit with Canada, and he covets their natural resources (just like with Greenland).

So, either Trump really is a complete moron, or this is more of his “flooding the zone” bullshit. But any American who believes that this is a serious proposal should be ashamed of themselves for falling asleep through all three years of their social studies classes in high school.

The six young engineers who are part of Musk’s DOGE team that has been taking over computers in the federal system have been outed. The six are named Akasha Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. Apparently these fuckboys were “outed” by Jared May, an assistant media technician at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Among other things, May knew that Coristine is a first-year student at Northeastern University.

A first year student!

Charlie Kirk, the conservative fuckwad, immediately called for Boston University to “lose ALL federal grants and funding if May isn’t fired immediately.”

Should these six have been outed like that.

Well, yeah, if they’re going to participate in what is essentially a coup of the United States government, you should have your name out there. You should have to explain to your friends, and your parents, and your girlfriend, and to your colleagues and to your dog why you’re participating in a coup against the United States government.

I mean, do I worry that one of these kids might get hurt?

Yes.

Would that be wrong?

Absolutely.

But each one of them is making a choice.

Nobody is forcing them to do this. Each one is choosing to do it, even if the consequences of not doing it might be harsh.

A lot of people are going to be faced with choices like this over the next four years.

Now that Trump has finally decided to levy tariffs on Canada — our closest ally in the world — and Mexico — our largest trading partner — plus China, I hope he keeps them in place for a while and triggers a large trade war.

And that it leads to much higher prices.

And that leads to a major recession.

Sorry America.

Trump, in his subtle way, screamed out in all caps on Truth Social:

WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!) BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID

Well, he’s half right. There might be a LOT of pain, but it will not be necessary to make America “great” again. But it may be necessary to finally put to bed the ridiculous lie that this election was about the “price of eggs.”

It wasn’t about the price of eggs.

It was about half of America wanting to be led by a racist asshole.

Let’s finally call a spade a spade, and deal with the reality of the situation, that the United States of America has been propagandized to a degree that half the population wants to blame immigrants and diversity, equity and inclusion for everything that is wrong with America.

Let’s deal with that reality.

I mean, I realize that middle America bridles at being called racist, but since they are (allegedly) so into telling the blunt truth, let’s tell the blunt truth: that half of America is not “sort of” or a “little bit” or “implicitly” racist; they’re just “flat out” racist.

Let’s deal with that reality.

Let’s figure out if the Black men and Latinos and suburban housewives who decided to make their camp with Trump in 2024 really want to stay there, or if it isn’t time to let go of some of the inherent blame shifting, and see if we can’t slowly work our way out of this dilemma and return to a place where one of the two major political parties hasn’t completely lost touch with reality.

Let’s get back to that point.

Well, it’s pretty clear by now that Trump not only wants to run the United States like a business, but in particular, he wants to run it like one of his businesses. Like the ones that have had to file for bankruptcy six times.

Good luck, America.

Trump is, of course, trying to clear away anybody who might provide some constraints on his actions. There are essentially no constraints on his action as the head of the various Trump organizations, and he wants it the same way with respect to the federal government. So he has cleared out 23 Inspectors General, and anybody from the Justice Department or the FBI who had a hand in the investigations of him — even though they were just doing the jobs they had been assigned to — anybody who might not cooperate with Trump’s whims.

Then, more recently, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management announced that all mosts of the federal workforce (not including the military) could choose to resign if they did so by February 6th, in which case they could retain their pay and benefits through September 30. On the surface, maybe that didn’t sound like such a bad deal. This idea had Elon Musk’s signature all over it, as Musk made exactly that kind of an offer to the employees of Twitter when he first took over. And quite a few of Twitter’s employees took him up on it at the time. Those who don’t quit voluntarily, according to Trump, are potentially subject to being fired.

The problem, of course, is that the federal government does not operate at all like a relatively small company like Twitter. At the time Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, the company had approximately 7,500 employees. All of them were basically “at will.” The federal government has approximately 2.1 million employees, and almost none of them are “at will.” But beyond that, there are many structural problems:

• About 90% of the federal workforce is either (1) unionized or (2) covered by various aspects of the civil service system, and consequently (Project 2025 notwithstanding) can only be fired “for cause.”
• The executive branch has no ability to pay “severance” for employees who resign unless Congress appropriates funds for them to do so.
• The suggestion that those who resign could take a second, non-government job during the deferred resignation period, doing so is likely to violate ethics rules that prohibit such behavior (if they could even find jobs).

In other words, the threat of being fired is largely a toothless tiger. Yes, in some cases agencies could be reorganized in such a way that some positions could simply be eliminated, but that would not be a large segment of the federal workforce.

All of this points to the ways in which the Trump administration is likely to be a kakistocracy, albeit one that could do plenty of damage. 

I have been arguing for a while that the opposition to Trump should take a page out of Trump’s own playbook and tie everything up in court. I’m talking about the ACLU, other legal advocacy groups, and the Attorney Generals of the blue states. They can do it.

The Trump administration may eventually win some of these cases, but it might take two years or more for them to do so. By that time we should be in 2026, with a likely Democratic House and Democratic Senate. After a while Trump will become so much of a lame duck and such a drag on his party that even his fellow Republicans will start ignoring him. In the meantime, everything has to be disputed, everything has to be challenged, everything has to be tied up in court.

Trump appeared before the media today in relation to the crash between a commute jet liner and a military helicopter at Reagan National Airport and appeared to blame diversity initiatives at the FAA for weakening the safety of our airspace.

“A group within the FAA determined that the workforce was too white, then they had concerted efforts to get the administration to change that and to change it immediately. This was in the Obama administration.”

Not content to leave it at that, Trump also suggested that there could be firings “if we find that people aren’t mentally competent. For some jobs, they have to be at the highest level of genius.” The crash has yet to be investigated, and there has been no determination as to whether the FAA did anything wrong.

Trump, of course, lost touch with reality as far back as his inauguration in 2016 when he claimed that he had a bigger crowd for his inauguration then Obama, when one could clearly see with the naked eye that he had a smaller crowd then Obama. He made his then-brand new press secretary, Sean Spicer (later to bomb on Dancing with the Stars) go out and make the claim for him.

This time, his brand new and sparkling press secretary, New Hampshire’s own Karoline Leavitt, go out and proclaim that that the Trump administration tried to stop all foreign aid because Biden sent “$50 million worth of condoms to Gaza” and that the administration was just focusing on being “good stewards of tax dollars.”

Condoms?

I have set my outrage meter down near zero, because it no longer matters what Trump says. He’s nuts. I am concerned with what Trump does, and here the early returns are that his administration is a bunch of nitwits who will attempt all kinds of nonsense that they don’t have the capacity to achieve.

But they may achieve some of it, which is reason enough to stay on guard.

As I’ve been saying over and over again, this is what half of America voted for. It’s only week 2 of the 2nd Trump administration, and we still have 206 weeks to go. We have to keep our eyes on the ball and stay tuned to what really matters while Trump (as Steve Bannon prognosticated) “floods the zone” with bullshit.

It’s going to be a long four years, my friends. A long four years.

I hope the MAGA community doesn’t think we’re going to “forgive and forget” when they roll out J.D. Vance in 2026.

After being pardoned by Trump, Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes did a kind of victory dance, with Tarrio calling into Alex Jones — why is that numbskull still on the air — and Rhodes walking up to the Capitol to talk with (at least one) Republican representative.

Oh good one!

In making the decision to pardon Tarrio and Rhodes in conjunction with the other 1500 supporters that he pardoned, Trump — who has a notoriously short attention span — reportedly said “fuck it, release them all!” instead of making any individualized decisions.

The response maybe wasn’t quite what Trump was anticipating. Many law enforcement organizations, including the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police — both of whom had endorsed Trump during the election — released statements that the decision “undermines the rule of law” and “devalues the sacrifices made by officers during the Capitol attack.”

No shit.

The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers certainly were encouraged by the pardons, and maybe Trump thinks that they will now function as his private militia.

But there is one wrinkle in the fabric that they may not have considered: civil lawsuits. Yeah,  they’ve been pardoned for their federal convictions, but all of the officers who were injured in the Capitol attack and who know who attacked them (or even who, in the case of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were part of groups who conspired to organize the attacks) can be sued in civil court.

For a lot of money.

There are realms and realms and realms of evidence already available to them, resulting from the various convictions that have already been obtained. The documentation is already there. And they don’t need to meet the “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, they only need to meet the “preponderance of the evidence” standard.

So if I were the victims I’d be gathering up some good lawyers and prepare to file a bunch of civil suits and class actions, and for Tarrio, Rhodes and some of the other pardonees, prepare to just rain on their parade.

So we started out today with Biden pardoning a bunch of people and then Trump pardoning a bunch of people. It’s not how the pardon power is supposed to be used. But it’s the new reality in the rule-breaking days of Trump.

Biden had pardoned Dr. Fauci, General Milley, Liz Cheney and the other members of the January 6th Committee. 

And then he pardoned members of his own family, including his two brothers, his sister and his sister’s husband, and one of his brother’s wives. These were all “preemptive” pardons in that none of them had been charged with a crime. They were just all people that Trump had threatened to prosecute, and even though it is extremely unlikely that any of them would have been convicted of anything — there is no evidence that any of them had committed any crimes — it avoids them having to endure investigations and lengthy periods of legal harassment, so it is “prophylactic” in that sense.

The only thing that sucks about it is that it gives conservatives more evidence to claim that Biden was part of a “crime” family and that these people did things that were wrong.

Then, about 12 hours later, Trump pardoned about 1500 people who had actually been convicted of offenses related to the January 6th insurrection.

I don’t even care anymore. If the voters of America cared, they wouldn’t have re-elected President Asshole. So while this is technically an injustice, in the long run it isn’t going to make any difference.

I mean, if there were justice in America, someone would have taken out the despicable Steven Miller by now.

So, now we live in a country in which we can expect that each succeeding presidential administration will take vengeance on the previous administration.

Swell.

Trump himself is, of course, fully insulated by the completely insane Trump v. United States decision.

Well, that one is in the books now. Nothing can be done about that one.

Now we’ll have to find out about the Trump administration the hard way: by living through it. Strap on your seatbelts kids, because you’re going to need them.

What should Democrats do to “rehabilitate” themselves over the next four years while Trump is president?

Not a thing.

Not a fucking thing.

I mean, I might tone down the politically correct rhetoric a bit, which has clearly alienated roughly half the country.

But other than that, just get out of the way and let the Republicans try to govern.

It’s already clear that the MAGA wing will fight the billionaire (“DOGE”) wing, and that they’re going to tear each other apart.

But let Trump levy his various tariffs. Nobody can stop him anyway. 

Let Trump try to deport 11 million undocumented farmworkers, and eldercare workers, and restaurant workers, and construction workers. He has nowhere to put them. Private prisons and other facilities where you could hold people are already essentially maxed out. 

And see what that does to the economy.

Just let Trump be Trump. Don’t get in his way. And then slowly, vaguely, haltingly, some of the middle class and the working class may eventually see that this fat orange billionaire doesn’t actually have their interests at heart. (There is a hardcore group of MAGA enthusiasts who will never believe, of course, that anything is Donald Trump’s fault.)

But for the rest of them, they’re going to have to find out the hard way. Let the experience begin.

If you want to stump one of your conservative friends, you can ask them this question: do you still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump?

I asked one of my conservative friends that question.

Haven’t heard a peep back.

Probably she thinks it’s a trap.

Because it is a trap. 

What can they say about a “stolen election” when the mechanisms used for Trump’s victory in 2024 were virtually identical to those used for Trump’s 2020 loss.

In any case, on Monday, January 6th, Vice President Kamala Harris bravely went before a Joint Session of the House and Senate and oversaw the certification of Donald Trump’s election victory. And also her own defeat.

As we know by now, with conservatives, virtually every accusation is a confession. One could make the argument that if there were any stolen elections in the last several decades, it was Republicans stealing elections from Democrats. Arguably four of them.

Jimmy Carter in 1980

With the passing this week of the 39th President of the United States, it’s a good time to look back at the Iran Hostage Crisis and the “October Surprise Theory” of how the 1980 election played out. 

First of all, let’s acknowledge that the 1980 Presidential Election was not close. Although, as it happens, Reagan barely got more than 50% of the vote. Independent candidate John Anderson got over 6% of the vote. Second, Carter wasn’t all that popular before the Iran Hostage Crisis, what with high inflation and the energy crisis, which led Carter to lower the national speed limit to 55 mph. All of that notwithstanding, there is now good evidence that the Reagan people were negotiating with Iran before Reagan became President — an activity which is strictly verboten under American law — and which led to the hostages being released literally just minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president.

If the hostages had been released earlier, would that have changed the outcome of the election?

Hard to know. Those 444 days we heard every night from Ted Koppel, in the program that eventually became Nighline, about how the hostages were still stuck in Iran, surely did not help Carter. But it’s a more plausible case of a stolen election than Trump’s allegations about 2020.

Al Gore in 2000

In 2000 we had, of course, the “hanging chads” and the Bush v. Gore case. The issue was who had won Florida. The vote there was very, very close. 

Initially, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes, over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. On the next day, the five conservative justices on the Court granted a stay, and shortly thereafter, decided in a 5-4 decision that the recount be stopped. The Court’s reasoning was complicated and involved equal protection issues, and we’re not going to review it all here (that would be a post onto itself). Bottom line is that it allowed Katherine Harris, Florida’s Secretary of State to certify the vote in favor of Bush, giving him Florida’s 25 electoral votes, just enough to exceed the required 270 threshold by one vote.

One bloody vote.

This was also the first of a series of elections in which the losing Democratic candidate won more of the popular vote than the victorious Republican candidate.

Would Gore have won if the “undervote” in Florida had been counted. Hard to know. The available evidence suggests that he probably would have. But since that count was never completed, we’ll never know for sure.

Hillary Clinton in 2016

Well, in 2016 Hillary won the popular vote by 2,868,686 votes, there was interference from Russia, and there was, of course, the October Surprise. Russian interference was richly documented in the Mueller Report, even though it did not lead to any indictments. That was, of course, mostly because of the Department of Justice’s interpretation that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any prosecutions; they were just of people other than President Trump.

Then the October Surprise: on October 28, FBI Director James Comey announced that he would review additional emails related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, which had been newly discovered on a computer that was seized by the FBI during an investigation of former congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner was married at the time to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. This was, of course, an entirely unnecessary exercise that led to absolutely nothing, except that it might have led to the very slim victories that Trump had in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which ultimately led to his victory in the electoral college. Comey should have known that there was no way that this empty exercise was not going to be prejudicial to Hillary’s campaign.

Did it make the difference in 2016? Who knows? It’s certainly more convincing than Trump’s claim that he won in 2020.

Kamala Harris in 2024

No one here is suggesting that Trump engaged in “voter fraud” as that term is normally defined. Certainly I’m not claiming that. But there is good reason to believe that Republicans engaged in voter suppression sufficient to make a difference.

The Australian publication Crikey conveniently identified nine different ways that Republicans had been trying to suppress the votes of Democrats, and in particular minorities and young people. These included: 

1. Preventing voter registration
2. Purging voter rolls
3. Gerrymandering districts
4. Requiring voter IDs
5. Closing polling places
6. Making it harder to vote
7. Preventing early and mail voting
8. Making it easier for officials to deny election results
9. Preventing registration by felons

Did voter suppression make the difference in 2024?

Hard to know.

However, what we can tell is that fewer people voted in 2024 than in 2020 by a noticeable amount. 

• In 2020 74,223,975 voted for Trump and 81,283,501 for Biden, totaling 155,507,476 votes.
• In 2024 77,303,573 voted for Trump and only 75,019,257 for Harris, totaling 152,322,830 votes.

That means that 3,184,646 fewer citizens voted for either candidate in 2024 rather than in 2020. That’s about a 2% reduction in total voters, and that would be enough to have swung the election for Harris. 

Now, obviously one cannot say that all the people who failed to vote in 2024 would have voted for Harris. But if just 2/3rds of them had voted for Harris, she would have beaten Trump in the popular vote count by almost 1 million votes.

In any case, it’s much more likely that voter suppression swung the 2024 election for Trump rather than that the 2020 election — which was examined and litigated extensively — was stolen from Trump.

The 2020 Presidential Election

If there was one election that clearly was not stolen, then it was the 2020 presidential election. No, in that one, 81,283,500 voters showed up to vote against the Orange Cheato. Actually, I did as well. So make that 81,283,501 voters (the official count).

In the aftermath there were court cases (63 of them), audits, investigations, false accusations, and (of course) an attempted insurrection. In none of these actions was there any indication of systematic voter fraud, and certainly not enough to change the outcome of the election. 

And yet, there we had Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, STILL being able to admit, simply and clearly, that the 2020 election was not stolen.

And Republicans wonder why we’re jaded at this point.