Court Drama

The civil war has started, apparently, but it's all on their side. I mean, they're fighting over who owns Trump, at least initially, between Laura Loomer, the self-described embodiment of MAGA, and Elon Musk, the embodiment of billionaires; who's going to be Trump's "sidepiece" as Loomer startlingly puts it, though I'm not sure she means us to understand the word the way I understand it, or whether she's aware how three months ago some of us thought she was advertising herself as the emperor's sidepiece in the traditional sense, speaking of stage 5 clingers:

No one can keep former President Donald Trump away from Laura Loomer.

Throughout his third presidential campaign, aides and advisers have done their best to shield him from Loomer, a far-right social media influencer, and similar figures who stroke his ego and stoke his basest political instincts. (NBC News, September 13)

Now it turns out there's an ideological component to the conflict, over the question of immigration. This goes back to last Sunday (as I learn from Heather Cox Richardson), when Trump named a member of the Musk-Andreesen-Ackman circle, Sriram Krishnan, as a senior White House adviser on artificial intelligence, and Loomer issued an angry protest the next day. Krishnan was born in India himself, and has advocated making it easier for US companies (thinking especially of the tech industry) to hire foreign workers on H-1B visas. This caused an explosion of rage in the nativist caucus of the Republican party—the part where Loomer and Stephen Bannon live—who wanted to know why foreigners were being preferred over the American-born:

Draft

 

I've felt a kind of proprietary interest in Jimmy Carter for all these years—pretty sure I've mentioned this before—because he's the only president who ever pardoned me for any of my crimes: Vietnam-era draft evasion in this instance, by executive order, on his first full day in office, January 21 1977. 

Blogfeast

Supermercado Batocchio, in Resistencia, Argentina.

 

Batocchio's annual Jon Swift Roundup (the Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves) is up.

Chaos Monkeys

One thing I think people are missing is the significance of the scene in the president-elect's box at the Army-Navy football game on December 14, where so many symbolic meetings seemed to be occurring, from Vice President–Elect Vance bringing killer Daniel Penny as his plus-one to the rival secretary of defense candidates Hegseth and DeSantis, but business appeared to be getting done in the deep conversations of Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Senate Majority Leader–Designate John Thune. The world's richest man, Elon Musk, brought a small boy, one of his numerous progeny, but in many of the pictures he looked like a stranger trying to photobomb the event, lonely and wistful, with an oddly large head.

AP photo by Stephanie Scarbrough.

We know what Trump and the congressional leaders were talking about, and it wasn't Musk's many interesting plans for cutting government spending. It was the urgent continuing budget resolution they were planning to vote on in the House on Wednesday the 18th, to prevent a government shutdown on Friday, in fact, and Trump was pushing some new demands in the opposite direction; instead of the resolution they planned, to carry them just to March, forcing them to go through the same thing in a matter of a few months, he wanted them to extend spending out for a full year, until next December, which I think would have been impossible to manage before the deadline, and in addition he wanted them to include a provision suspending the debt ceiling, the thing Democrats usually have to beg Republicans to help them with, because the Republicans are so famously conservative about the national debt.

(The debt ceiling is currently suspended, under the terms of an earlier deal; that's not what would have shut the government down when the deal expired on January 1, but it will shut it down fairly soon, maybe mid-June, at current spending levels, so they most likely will need to re-suspend the debt ceiling, or eliminate it permanently as Trump apparently suggested in his conversation with Johnson and Thune.)

So my theory is Musk didn't enjoy this. His plan to cut two and a half trillion dollars from the national debt was not being taken seriously (he didn't actually have a plan, but everyone should have understood that he was so smart it would happen before you knew it). Trump was going ahead on the assumption that he'd be adding $7.7 trillion over the next ten years. Musk was being slighted.

For the Record: Moldbuggery

Saw something yesterday that tempted me to go have a look at something written by enemy of democracy Curtis Yarvin, the artist formerly known as "Mencius Moldbug" (and I really should register a protest against at the use of the Latinized name of the philosopher known as Mengzi (孟子, 372-289 B.C.E.), the most humane and liberal of the early Confucians, a man who sincerely and deeply believed in the innate goodness of the human being and the saving value of education for all, a man as remote intellectually from the Moldbug as it is possible for anyone to be, it actually gets me kind of angry). 

It's pretty interesting, though of course perverted, what Yarvin is doing there, which is spelled out at his own substack graymirror.substack.com/p/a-conversa.... He claims FDR exercised an "informal dictatorship-for-life" that was so immensely powerful that he retained power after he died. Or at any rate left behind a zombie presence that governs us still, 80 years later, presumably forcing us against our will to accept Social Security payments and workers' comp and unemployment benefits and the like:

Read FDR’s First Inaugural, specifically the part where he demands the powers of a general resisting an enemy invasion. In 1933! These were the powers FDR needed to create what, during his informal dictatorship-for-life, was more or less his personal executive monarchy, then after his death became the formalized administrative state.

That is to say, no, Roosevelt did not rule from beyond the grave, but the institutions of the New Deal persisted after he died, and, with the advent of civil rights laws and no doubt Obamacare, even got worse, from Yarvin's point of view...

It's Gangland

 

From Kash Patel, The Plot Against the King.

So nothing is illegal any more:

Inauguration funds are the bribe-iest funds. No reporting requirements on expenditures from inaugural funds. Trump can pocket them outright.

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— David Waldman (@kagrox.bsky.social) December 12, 2024 at 6:45 PM

Bezos following on Zuckerberg, who chose the same nice round number for his inauguration donation, but it doesn't occur to Washington Post to call that one a bribe either:

The donation, which was confirmed by Meta spokesman Andy Stone, is the latest effort by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to mend fences with the political right, which has persistently criticized him following the company’s 2021 decision to ban Trump from Meta’s social platforms. The donation arrives nearly two weeks after Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November.

And today it's reported that Sam Altman of Open AI has also joined the million-dollar inauguration club, is that cool or what? And Apple's Tim Cook, Tim Apple as Trump has called him, has a dinner date coming up with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, so I suppose he'll be ponying up his million soon.

Hardly anyone is using the word "bribe", despite the fact that we basically know Trump pocketed donations from his first inauguration, in 2017, another million dollars, as it happens, in the form of grossly inflated charges paid by the Inauguration Committee to the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania for the inauguration events held there; I'd forgotten, but DC Attorney General Karl Racine brought a lawsuit against the committee and the Trump Organization over it and won a $750,000 settlement out of them. Or course there's also a fig leaf of denial: the defendants say they are settling only to avoid the cost and trouble of litigating, and do not admit any "wrongdoing, unlawful conduct, or liability".

Annotated Edition

Mark Wilson/Getty Images, via Vox.

Annotated edition of the NBC interview with the president-elect. Nearly all of his response to the first question, "What do you plan to accomplish in your first 100 days?"

Well, we’re going to do something with the border, very strong, very powerful. 

But you won't tell us what?

That’ll be our first signal — first signal to America that we’re not playing games. 

Oh, sending a signal. Something with the border, and it's going to be a signal. To America.

We have people coming in by the millions, as you know, and a lot of people shouldn’t be here. Most of them shouldn’t be here.

It has not been anything like millions at the border since December 2023, and especially since Biden's executive order of last June.

And how do you know who should and shouldn't be here?  

But we have jails being emptied into our country. We have mental institutions from all over the world being emptied into our country. 

Nobody, including your own campaign staff, has ever been able to point to any evidence that there is any truth to this story—

Haute Diplomatie

 

Russia Pyotr Veliky missile cruiser makes port call in Tartus, Syria, 2023, via Countercurrents.

Let me get this straight? Trump dithers on about the situation in Syria and his concern is what's best for Russia?

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— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:31 AM

Here's the rest of it. It is ironic, of course, that he criticizes Obama for staying out of Syria and then calls for the same course of action. But his focus is on Russia. Not the US. Not the Syrian people. Russia.

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— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:33 AM

Couple of thoughts:

Obviously, Trump did not write this. The thinking is banal, but it's moderately complex and coherently designed toward a single main idea, as Vance notes, the question of how the Syria events will affect Russia. Completely different from Trump's "weave". Also not a subject to which our narcissist-in-chief is likely to devote that much consideration, with participants who aren't his own enemies—and while Russia might be considered one of his friends, he doesn't usually talk about his friends in this tone, as having made a mistake. He's usually "saying nice things" about his friends in return for their saying nice things about him, not speculating about them in this detached way.

The Last Postmortem

 

Screen Capture from Save Daddy Trump on Steam.

A popular postmortem sentiment is the idea that what happened in the US in this month's election is what has happened all over the place in developed democracies, in the wake of the inflation that accompanied the recovery from the Covid pandemic all over the world, when angered voters punished the ruling parties in a frustration with the way democracy is seen to be failing: 

“There’s an overall sense of frustration with political elites, viewing them as out of touch, that cuts across ideological lines,” said Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center.

He noted that a Pew poll of 24 countries found that the appeal of democracy itself was slipping as voters reported increasing economic distress and a sense that no political faction truly represents them.

and even though inflation in the US wasn't nearly as bad as in some of those other countries, our voters just did the same thing.

I wanted to check that hypothesis out for the flood of big elections between 2021 and 2024, and found evidence for a much more nuanced picture: a bad time for a few ruling parties, but not so great either for Trumpies and like-minded individuals on the nationalist, anti-immigrant, authoritarian side of the right (loosely characterized as "fascist" below, sue me if you don't like it):