As Thousands Jeer

 

Via ABC News.

Via Axios:

Trump signed an executive order Monday that puts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in charge of training a specialized National Guard unit dedicated to "ensuring public safety" in D.C.

• "They say: 'We don't need him. Freedom, freedom, he's a dictator,'" Trump said at a White House event, suggesting deploying the National Guard in Chicago next.
• "A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator," Trump added. "I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person."

There's something there I don't think he's done before, and it's at least a little spooky. Nobody comes out and says, "Hi, I'm Donald and I'll be your dictator tonight." When Trump was saying during the campaign that he was going to be a dictator but only on Day 1, to "close the border and drill, baby, drill", it was reasonable to understand him as joking, or whatever that thing is he does when we're expected not to take him literally, because that's not how you apply for the job, in the first place.

You never announce your intention to be a dictator if that's your plan: you get some simulacrum of the vox populi to ask you to be the dictator and turn them down. Caesar got Antony to offer him a golden diadem three times at the Lupercalia (the Carnival-type festival held on the Ides of February) of 44 B.C.E., according to Plutarch, and he said no each time, understanding that the Senate and People of the city had absolutely rejected kingship centuries earlier, but he had already accepted an offer (from Antony's colleague Lepidus) of the official dictatorship in 49, which he held for just 11 days, long enough to stage an election making him one of that year's consuls, and was subsequently reappointed another 3 times, until his appointment early in 44 as dictator perpetuo, dictator in perpetuity, the thing that decided Brutus and Cassius and the other conspirators that they had to kill him right away, a month after the Lupercalia, on the Ides of March. Caesar's rejection of the golden diadem hadn't impressed them.

Anyway, that's what Trump is doing in the Axios story, "A lot of people are saying we like a dictator." He's saying I don't want it, but maybe you should make me an offer, because I am extremely qualified, by gender and sense both common and uncommon. That's the conventional way to put in your application.

Another Casualty of the War on Reality

Via 5 Calls Civic Action.

There's a hint of rationality in Trump's violent reaction to the July jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when he accused the BLS of "rigging" the numbers in an attempt to harm him ("ME"), and abruptly fired the commissioner, Erika McEntarfer:

Though the history is virtually all fiction: the October 2024 jobs report, issued two days before the election on November 1, was dismal for the Democrats, counting just 12,000 new jobs for the month, effectively zero, and a downward revision of 112,000 jobs to the August and September numbers; there was no report issued on November 15 (it always comes out on the first Friday of the new month); and in the next report, issued on December 6, listed a gangbusters gain for November of 227,000 jobs and significant upward revisions of 56,000 for September and October—so if it was rigged to affect the presidential election it must have been rigged against the Harris campaign and in Trump's favor. (Of course it wasn't rigged at all.) The 818,000-job downward revision referred to in the "Truth" was announced in August 2024, well before the election, and covered the previous 12 months, so that would have favored Trump too. Has anybody but me bothered to check any of this out? 

Dictatorship Takes Shape

Dominance and Submission. Photo by Reuters/Jonathan Drake via Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

There's way too much going on. Two bogus emergencies formally declared, the one at the border and the "energy emergency" about Trump's weird belief that the US doesn't mine enough natural gas, and then I think what you might call a "woke emergency" signaled by his actions in the Justice Department: seen, for instance in the canceling of ongoing civil rights cases and police department consent decrees.

An ominous restructuring of the department's procedures was reported in today's Guardian in a piece on the DOJ's investigations of the Biden administration, of its "weaponization" of the federal government (read: its investigations of Trump's criminal participation in the January 6 insurrection and in the theft of government documents) and of its "censorship of speech" in the 2020 campaign--the Twitter Files stories attempting to suggest that when Twitter's trust and safety department blocked users from sharing the New York Post's October 14 Hunter Biden laptop story for a full 24 hours before allowing it was what James Comer called 

a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents...

in which the company was obeying the dictates of the FBI (it wasn't).

The new wrinkle in these two orders is in the reporting requirements: instead of directing investigators to direct the final reports to the department's office of personal responsibility or its inspector general, which would be the normal procedure, they will go to a political appointee at the White House—the deputy chief of staff for policy, who happens to be Mr. Stephen Miller, resuming the job he took with the first Trump administration in December 2016. 

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...

Literary Corner: Ripcord

Image via Kalson.

In Conclusion, America Has Always Been a Nation

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

.....But with voting, one of your most important things you can do, maybe in many ways, your most important, they don't want to approve voter ID. That's because they want to cheat, But until then Republicans must win, We have to win this election. Most important election ever. We want a landslide that's too big to rig. If you want to save America, get your friends, get your family, get everyone, you know, and vote, vote early vote, absentee, vote on election day, I don't care how but you have to get out and vote, And again, Christians get out and vote just this time, you won't have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, you won't have to vote any more. My beautiful Christians. I love you Christians, I'm a Christian. I love you. Get out. You've got to get out and vote in four years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good. You're not going to have to vote. In conclusion, America has always been a nation, one built and sustained by Americans of faith. It was faith that led the Pilgrims to cross an ocean and settle this majestic continent. It was belief in our creator that led the patriots to defend their liberties in the war for independence. It was faith in America's God-given destiny that pushed the pioneers to journey west and it was trusting God that led generations of American believers to end slavery, defeat fascism and communism, and make this into the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world. But now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower, and its strength.......

This somewhat longer piece of the transcript than you may have seen before provides a lovely illustration of how Trump's strange rhetoric works like a parachute jump, with the teleprompter text, in this case clearly by Stephen Miller, serving as a kind of ripcord to break his free fall and float him safely to earth.

He's clearly exhausted at this point in the speech—he's been going on for nearly an hour—and he's tumbling into truly insane-sounding babble; there on the screen in front of him is the rescue message: "In conclusion..." and he leaps for it, almost coming to grief at the complicated grammar of Miller's first sentence ("America has always been a nation built and sustained..." breaking him after the first six words) but recovering quickly enough and finishing the peroration on how America will become great again on November 5 without serious mishaps.

I think people have been overinterpreting the apostrophe to the beautiful Christians here, by the way, when they tell us it's Trump confessing to his evil plan to cancel the 2028 elections, and maybe all future elections. He may have such plans, and JD Vance's monarchist mentor the former Mencius Moldbug certainly does, but that's not what Trump is talking about. 

To know that, you have to do something the political reporters aren't willing to do, which is to look above the particular soundbite to the speech as a whole. Trump's speeches, in the long, improvised solo riffs outside the frame Miller or another writer has provided for him, are chaotically disorganized, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a particular idea he wants to push forward—it's just that he can't put it together in a coherent way, because he's so distracted by his other obsessions.

In this case it's two things he's associating, that came up a bit before the halfway point: one fact, about the relatively low propensity of a big component of his base, Dominionist Christians and gun nuts, to show up at the polls ("And by the way, Christians have to vote, you know, I don't want to scold you, do you know that Christians do not vote proportionately? They don't vote like they should. They're not big voters") and one piece of paranoid fiction he's been retailing for at least eight years, that our elections are plagued by illegal or somehow just bad voting, because our laws on who gets to vote, after the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are too lax in some way he's not really able to clarify, but when he says he's going to "fix" it, what he means is explained earlier in the speech ("But I say look, we got to fix our laws on voting. We have to start with voter ID"). The beautiful Christians must put themselves out now, even if it means indulging in the suspect early voting and absentee voting, precisely so he and Congress can change these "ridiculous" laws—

Christians are a group that's known not to vote very much. You have to go out at least this election. Just give us and get us into that beautiful White House, vote for your congressmen and -women, vote for your senators. We will change this country for the better, this country will be great again like never before. You've got to vote and I've said it before and I'll say it again. November 5th, which is a period really because you're allowed to vote early, they have early voting, late voting. Everything is so ridiculous. We should have one-day voting, paper ballots, voter ID, and certification of citizenship, and that's what we're striving for. But voting actually starts on September 6th in North Carolina, a great state. We're doing very well there....Then it's Pennsylvania toward the end of September and it's various states in September...

—and in 2028 beautiful Christians won't have to stress themselves out any more. That's the message Trump is trying to convey: please ignore all that stuff I told you about early voting, that is, I was right, but you should do it this year anyway, and if you do enough of it this year you won't have to do it again.

The program he's hoping to implement being very precisely the one proposed in this year's Republican platform, almost as if he was reading it off the teleprompter (as he may well have been)

We will implement measures to secure our Elections, including Voter ID, highly sophisticated paper ballots, proof of Citizenship, and same day Voting. We will not allow the Democrats to give Voting Rights to illegal Aliens.

(solving the imaginary problem of noncitizen voting, which almost never happens, but of course making huge trouble for the 10% of US citizens who have trouble proving their citizenship, who are of course mostly relatively poor, and therefore more likely to vote for Democrats). The standard Republican effort to reduce turnout.

This isn't, again, to suggest that no Republicans are plotting to overthrow the US electoral system altogether, as we know they are. Though they aren't the same as the ones working to overthrow it now, in case Democrats win in November: 

The campaign involves a powerful network of Republican lawyers and activist groups, working loosely in concert with the Republican National Committee. Many of the key players were active in Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

But unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.

Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.

What I think we need to understand is that Trump Republicans are working now not just on the "two-pronged" effort to plan for whether they win (Project 2025) or lose (January 6 redux) but on a whole layer cake of strategies, to which Trump himself is not entirely privy; he is personally too stupid to play a decisive role, though he is enough of a loose cannon that he might wreck their plans at any moment. You can't take anything he says seriously, let alone literally, though you should always look in what he says for evidence as to what the state of play is, as far as he's been allowed to see it by the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society and Claremont Institute and other intellectual stakeholders who are squirreling over the actual work. Trumpism is more than poor Trump, the grinning pumpkinface, their only representative of 2020s rizz. He himself is more like a kind of stochastic candidate—you never know what he'll come up with next—but it's never as interesting as it looks.

Immigration and Caesarism

Jessie Fuentes stands during an August 7 vigil organized by residents of Eagle Pass to protest Gov. Greg Abbot’s policies and to remember migrants who died crossing the Rio Grande. Fuentes is the owner of a kayak business in Eagle Pass, which he started after he retired in order to offer tours of the river. According to Manuel Ortiz, Fuentes is a deeply spiritual man and a lover of nature. He sees Abbot’s barriers as a violation of life, both of the people and of the natural world. “What the government is doing here is killing the river… They are destroying our community.” (Photo by Manuel Ortiz, via Ethnic Media Services)

 

I was enjoying this rightwinger response to the Senate's immigration bill, from Carl Goldman of the Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce, at the Santa Clarita News—

Fact #1: The proposed bill will legalize up to 5,000 adults to cross the border DAILY. Children are unlimited. That’s over 1.8 million per year, plus kids. Under the legislation the border never closes.

Fact #2: All future legal disputes will be taken away from the states and controlled by the US Federal DC District Court. This court is perhaps our most lenient court in the land. It would prohibit any Governor and any state Attorney General from effectively challenging any Federal immigration policy, such as the current “open border” crisis that saw 8.5 unvetted illegal immigrants enter the country under the Biden administration, an amount greater than the current population in 36 states.

Fact #3: The bill calls for 3,275 new border personnel. This sounds like a good thing, assisting the already overloaded border patrol. Read the fine print. These new employees won’t stop the flow. Their roll will be to speed up the processing.

Fact #4: Once this law is put into place, it will be extremely difficult to pass a new law tightening policies. It would tie the hand of future administrations from implementing a closure or partial closure of the border.

Fact #5: The Republican led House of Representatives passed HR 2 last May. It created a much more effective set of tighter immigration policies. To date, it has remained untouched for over nine months on US Senator House Majority leader, Chuck Schumer’s desk [except, as reader Foghorn Leghorn points out, when Ted Cruz added the text of HR2 as an amendment and the vote failed, 32-58].

These five facts alone should be enough to convince any rational individual questioning our current open border policy to run as far away from the Senate bill as possible. How any Republican or Democrat Senator could support this is creating insurmountable challenges for our country. Perhaps they skipped over a few of the 400 pages.

—when I started realizing he was right, in a way. 

The Road to Dictatorship

 

That thing about "Speaker" Mike Johnson proposing to release more video from the January 6 insurrection, but only with some of the faces of the rioters blurred out "because we don't want them to be retaliated against and we don't want them to be charged by the DOJ," is that that completely obviates the purpose Republicans claimed to have for releasing them, which was supposed to be for "transparency".

Actually, let's just come out and say it, the official reason for demanding the public release of the videos was the purported evidence they would probably have of who the "real" villains of January 6 were—not the 688 simple folks who have been convicted of crimes committed in the affair, 587 of them pleading guilty, but the masterminds of "antifa" and/or the FBI who secretly organized the thing. Which, of course, never happened, so there wouldn't be any evidence on the videos that it did. The object of Gaetz and Biggs and Gohmert and Greene and all those Republicans demanding the release of the videos was not, in fact, to get them released (against the advice of Capitol security, which feared making them generally available would reveal too much about the arrangements in the building, such as the locations of security cameras), but to nourish the paranoid belief that the 688 criminal convicts (or however many there are now) had been entrapped by the Deep State/Communist/Fascist conspiracy, by making it look as if the Capitol authorities were holding stuff back.

Weaponizing

 

FYI, at the Substack, a slightly long read, no paywall.

Also, I would like it noted that the great Popehat (Ken White) wrote a Substack piece on the National Review's theory that it's illegal for Jack Smith to charge Trump with conspiracy to defraud the government that pretty much exactly dovetails with my Twitter thread piece, except that of course unlike me Popehat knows what he's talking about (where I've got nothing but logic).