Category: Banana Republicanism

Trump’s Threat To The Constitution

The Daily Escape:

From Steve Inskeep, speaking about the legal plight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who Trump says he can’t get back from El Salvador:

“If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”

There is a lot of stuff happening. Trump has tested all sorts of limits, including defying a 9-0 Supreme Court order in  the case of Abrego Garcia’s extradition to El Salvador mentioned in Steve Inskeep comment above. He has turned the US economy into a giant guessing game by toggling tariffs on and off.

From Dan Pfeiffer:

“….everyone is focused on Trump’s tariff policy. How could you not be? The stock market has been crashing, the bond market is freaking out, and worries about inflation and recession are mounting. When watching your retirement account drop like a rock, it’s hard to focus on anything else.

But we are also amid an emerging Constitutional crisis that could fundamentally reshape democracy.”

Last month, Trump deported Abrego Garcia to El Salvador where he is being held in a notorious prison known for torturing and starving inmates. Abrego Garcia is from El Salvador and was in this country illegally. But a judge had ruled that he could not be sent home because the gangs there posed a threat to his life.

After Abrego Garcia’s illegal deportation, the case went to the US Supreme Court where the Trump Administration admitted that Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador in error, but they have refused to do anything to bring him back to the US. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared:

“The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”

In a bit of a coincidence, Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, was in Washington  Monday for a previously scheduled meeting with Trump, where Bukele said he refused to return Abrego Garcia  to the US.

Moreover, in the single most disturbing display since he was reelected, Trump asked Bukele to build several more Terrorism Confinement Centers to house US citizens. Trump also told reporters that he was open to deporting US citizens if they had committed violent, criminal acts. Trump said:

“If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem….We’re studying the laws right now. Pam [Bondi, the attorney general] is studying. If we can do that, that’s good.”

But, US citizens cannot legally be deported.

The only exception is if a US citizen is credibly accused of committing a crime in another country and the government decides to honor an extradition request.

The administration’s position is that they can remove people in error or in defiance of court orders, and once deported, they cannot be compelled to engage in any specific act of diplomacy or foreign policy since those are the exclusive powers of the Executive Branch.

What this all means is that Trump will most likely escalate to deporting US citizens. The courts can try to stop this by, for example, holding executive branch officials including the president in contempt. That is highly unlikely since the Supreme Court ruled last year that the office of the presidency cannot commit a crime if it is done in the pursuit of normal job responsibilities, which would include foreign affairs.

It seems that Trump may not be held legally accountable even for deporting US citizens.

There is nothing to stop him unless the Republicans in Congress decide to stop him. He could be impeached and removed from office, of course, But the Republicans have taken a pass twice already on that option, despite airtight cases against him.

Republican politicians are behaving with deference to power and a fear of standing out. From Kyla Scanlon:

“As Umberto Eco warned in Ur-Fascism, authoritarian systems don’t return with parades and uniforms. They return in a culture where obedience masquerades as patriotism – or as economic strategy.

When disagreement becomes disloyalty, when nuance is dismissed as weakness, when conformity becomes civic virtue, we’re no longer living in a democracy. We’re participating in the performance of one.”

Congress could stop him. They have the authority, but they do nothing. This paralysis is what Umberto Eco described as a “fear of difference” where dissent is dangerous, alternative views are threatening, and deviation is punished.

What we get is a legislative body that performs democracy, but no longer willingly exercises its Constitutional powers.

Standing up to Trump would mean risking access to donors, media cycles, committee power, and the favor of a political ecosystem that now functions more like a loyalty marketplace than a deliberative body. So they completely ignore the Constitution at great costs to their constituents.

At this point, the Democrats can no longer treat Trump with any deference. The entire House Democratic Caucus should draw up articles of impeachment and seek to introduce them. The Senate Democrats should put a hold on everything until hearings are granted. Everything must stop until this is resolved.

From Dan Pfeiffer:

“This is the moment. We are at a crossroads. It’s time to speak up. Corporations have bent the knee; law firms are submitting to Trump; Congress is ceding its authority, and corporate media is making excuses. The courts are trying to stop Trump’s worst offenses, but he ignores their dictates.”

This is the most serious threat to our democracy since the Civil War.

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The Art Of The Bad Deal

The Daily Escape:

You cannot negotiate with a market. You can manipulate it, but in the long run markets do what they do. From the NYT :

“A sharp sell-off in US government bond markets and the dollar has set off fears about the growing fallout from President Trump’s tariffs, raising questions about what is typically seen as the safest corner for investors during times of turmoil.

Yields on 10-year Treasuries — the benchmark for a wide variety of debt — whipsawed on Wednesday after Mr. Trump paused the bulk of the levies he had threatened the week before and raised the rates charged on Chinese goods after that country retaliated. The reversal sent U.S. stocks soaring.”

And the bond market is not having any of Trump’s nonsense. We nearly had a major financial crisis. This is the part you don’t know. The bond markets freaking out means that, unchecked, we were maybe a week away from possible bank failures.

We’re talking about the market for US Treasury bonds—normally among the safest assets in the world. They started convulsing, along with the stock market. The yield on 10-year Treasuries leapt to 4.5%, up from 3.9% days earlier. That meant bond prices, which move inversely to yields, had cratered. The failure of both risky and supposedly safe assets at once, threatened to destabilize the financial system itself.

Why did the bond markets start to collapse? There was a technical reason, which was that losses in the stock market were so severe and widespread that hedge funds needed to sell bonds to cover losses. And money managers moved away from the slumping US dollar.

But more than that was a general, widespread loss of confidence In the US itself.

So what happened was something like this. Whatever sane minds are in the Oval Office probably desperately tried to warn Trump that we were indeed likely just a few days away from bank failures. That if the catastrophic fire-sale of US government bonds didn’t stop, the consequences would be ruinous.

From JV Last:

“William Cohan had an excellent explanation last night of where the bond market is after Trump’s tariff pause”:

The bond market can be broadly understood as a device that measures risk. The riskier an economic environment is, the higher the yield on bonds goes.

Over the course of Trump’s brief tariff regime the 10-year yield on T-bills went from 3.86% to 4.54% —a 17.6% climb in less than a week. That’s a screaming klaxon alarm.

Yesterday, after Trump announced his 90-day pause, the yield only dropped back to 4.4%. Which suggests that the bond market was not especially reassured.

One of the big risks is China. China holds $760b in US Treasuries. Should the Chinese decide to lower their purchasing of T-bills at the next auction, that will drive up the yield as the Treasury Department has to make them more attractive in the face of slackening demand. Which would in turn ratchet the entire bond market up another level of fear.

Why do bonds matter? Because bonds are how people finance debt—they are a rough approximation of the belief that it is safe to extend credit. And without credit, financial markets can’t function.

It’s all about risk. From Larry Summers: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Long-term interest rates are gapping up, even as the stock market moves sharply downwards. This highly unusual pattern suggests a generalized aversion to US assets in global financial markets. We are being treated by global financial markets like a problematic emerging market.”

Donald Trump’s erratic and foolish actions have turned America, the most desirable financial haven in the world, into a whirlpool of risk. The safest way to conduct business now is to limit exposure to the US to the greatest extent possible. From the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The chaos that has followed last week’s announcement has made companies wary about adding more upheaval with a drastic change to their supply chains. Faced with constant flux and unpredictability, companies are choosing to stay with what they know: longstanding relationships with Chinese suppliers or manufacturing partners.”

Driving multinationals deeper into relationships with China is not the art of the deal. It’s the destruction of stability and the start of a long, slow slide into a vortex.

Consider if you were to make an offer to buy a house: Would your opening bid be 50% of the asking price and would you expect a counter-offer? No, that’s bad faith negotiating. That’s pretty much what this tariff rollout has been like. “Let me start with the most ridiculous thing I can come up with and see if they bite!” The seller would tell you to go F yourself and find someone else to buy the home.

The whole world is going to do this. We’re going to carve ourselves out of a seat at the table.

Let Scott Galloway have the last word:

“The definition of stupid is hurting others while hurting yourself. Let’s hope the Republicans riding shotgun will realize the guy with his hand on the wheel is crazy.

My prediction: Xi will not back down. With Trump, he’s come to the same conclusion as Succession’s Logan Roy re his own kids: ‘You are not serious people.’”

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Cory Booker’s Speech

The Daily Escape:

On August 29, 1957, Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) completed 24 hours and 18 minutes of filibuster on the Senate floor against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The bill passed two hours after the filibuster and was signed into law by President Eisenhower.

On Tuesday night, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) exceeded that record for a one-person Senate floor speech. His is not technically a filibuster, because he didn’t do it as part of the discussion of a particular bill. But he outlasted the white supremacist from the 1950s.

On the floor of the Senate, Booker invoked the late Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, who had been one of the original Freedom Riders challenging racial segregation in 1961. In 1965, Lewis had his skull fractured by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama as he marched with protesters on their way to Montgomery to demand their voting rights be protected.

Booker reminded us that Lewis was famous for telling people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” Booker said that in the years since Trump took office, he has been asking himself, “How am I living up to his words?” He was majestic and poignant, plain-spoken and fiery. He gave Democrats a reason to hope about the future of the resistance in the Democratic Party.

Rather than whining about “being the minority” and “having no legislative power,” he used his only political asset: His voice.

Senator Booker did what desperate Democrats have been begging their leaders to do: Speak up, make good trouble, raise a ruckus, and rally the faithful! It was his finest moment. Sen. Booker ended his speech with these words:

“This is a moral moment. It is not left or right. It is right or wrong. Let’s get in good trouble. Madame President, I yield the floor.”

The above was delivered after 25 hours of non-stop “on-his-feet” filibustering. An obviously exhausted Booker none-the-less delivered an emotional and powerful closing. (See ABC News / YouTube): Cory Booker ends record-breaking Senate speech with tribute to late John Lewis.

From JVL:

“To those saying Booker’s filibuster didn’t achieve anything, I agree. It was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. It was a call.

And calls can mean something, even if they don’t “achieve” results.

It meant something to know that Booker has seen the same things we’re seeing and that these things made an impression on him, too.

It meant something to know that Booker understands the moment.

It meant something to know that there are more of us than we believed.

It meant something to know that others are willing to stand up, too.”

More:

“That’s what Cory Booker’s filibuster was about. He realized that in order to get people to pay attention, he had to do something extraordinary. There are only a hundred people on the planet who are allowed to filibuster. He is one of them. So he used the platform he had.”

By daring to step into a leadership role in the Democratic resistance, his historic effort should motivate other Democrats to engage in bolder, more aggressive pushback than has been the status quo in Congress to date.

This is necessary because there’s a palpable level of agitation and discontent across America, and other than Bernie and AOC, Democrats are not tapping into it. Our politicians shouldn’t be on listening tours, they should be stirring up the populace, showing a path forward. And there is a demand for it. The Hill reported that: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“More than 350 million people liked Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) floor speech on TikTok live, as the senator approached 25 hours of holding the floor in the Senate chamber.”

Democratic politicians must leave DC, where they say they have almost no power, and return to their districts and stir up the public. Have rallies. Otherwise, everybody’s going to just go on with their own life until we’re living in the American equivalent of Hungary.

Like Booker, all Democrats need to tap into the anger Americans are feeling. Show the Republicans that the country isn’t behind them. We have to force the issue; they have to own the consequences of their actions.

Trump’s incompetence at governing has to be highlighted every day. Right now, Dems aren’t making Trump’s incompetence the main issue. They are reacting to the latest tariff outrage.

Booker has stepped up. People don’t care if it’s technically a filibuster. He has held the floor for more than 24 hours to highlight Trump-Musk wrongdoing. He has spoken words on the Senate floor that we’ve needed to hear. He has mobilized a majority of Democratic Senators. Courage is contagious.

We need to rally against the nihilism and cruelty of Trump’s authoritarian moment.

This can be the turning point if Democrats must whip up the voters to disrupt the tsunami of destruction Elon and Trump have begun.

Let’s have more of this.

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Destruction of Government by Elon (DOGE)

The Daily Escape:

It used to be that In America, one truism of politics is that Social Security (SS) is the “third rail”: You mess with it at your political peril. Republicans have never liked Social Security. They voted against it when it was passed in 1935, and they have been trying to get rid of it in the 90 years since then.

But the problem is that SS is one of the most successful programs created by the government. It has reduced poverty among seniors from nearly 40% to only about 10% (and SS provides at least a subsistence level of income to that remaining 10%). It provides an income for people with disabilities who cannot work. And it has never added a penny to the national debt. Justifiably, it is a very popular program with Americans.

Because of its popularity, Republicans have never been able to abolish the program ̶   but they keep trying. In 2005, GW Bush wanted to privatize SS (putting seniors at risk by putting their money in the stock market). That led to a huge political blowback, and Bush dropped the idea.

Across the years, Trump has consistently promised not to touch Social Security, except now Musk’s DOGE may break Trump’s promise. Musk’s agency almost cut off phone  service for people filing SS claims, and stopped only after the WaPo raised a stink:

“The Social Security Administration…abandoned plans it was considering to end phone service for millions of Americans filing retirement and disability claims after The Washington Post reported that Elon Musk’s US DOGE Service team was weighing the change to root out alleged fraud…The shift would have directed elderly and disabled people to rely on the internet and in-person field offices to process their claims, curtailing a service that 73 million Americans have relied on for decades to access earned government benefits.

However, Social Security and White House officials said the administration will still move ahead with another far more limited element of the original proposal: Customers will no longer be able to change a direct deposit routing number or other bank information by phone.”

The phone service change may not be happening, but Elon is still gunning for Social Security. This is from March 11:

“Elon Musk pushed debunked theories about Social Security on Monday while describing federal benefit programs as rife with fraud, suggesting they will be a primary target in his crusade to reduce government spending….“Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” Musk told the Fox Business Network. “That’s the big one to eliminate.’”

Musk also called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”, and has promised to cut the Social Security Administration’s workforce by 12%.

DOGE can’t actually abolish Social Security. But it can seriously damage it to the extent that the agency wouldn’t be able to deliver checks on time, wouldn’t be able to help recipients make needed changes, and won’t be able to effectively register new retirees. And once the agency can no longer function effectively, Congressional Republicans will step in to “reform” it. They will do that by substantially cutting benefits, or privatizing the program. Probably the latter, because that will benefit moguls on Wall Street.

In February, Trump reassured the nation that:

“Social Security will not be touched, it will only be strengthened, and an unnamed White House official told NBC that “Musk’s personal opinions about Social Security have no impact on Trump’s policies.”

Is Trump really willing to mess with Social Security payments? And if not, why is his administration acting like it’s getting ready to do that? What would be the political upside to broadcasting that you’re going to screw with America’s favorite entitlement program, and then not actually doing it?

What is clear is that the Trump administration doesn’t particularly seem like they’re governing with an eye to future elections. Old people vote in large numbers, and if you stop them from getting the checks they need to live — or even threaten to do so — you’re putting yourself in grave electoral danger.

And if Trump’s team isn’t worried about future elections…well, that’s even more deeply concerning.

The DOGE effort is the newest attempt by Republicans to attack Social Security. It gives the GOP some cover by letting DOGE do the dirty work. But only SS has the huge budget that Republicans want to get their hands on.

This is the latest effort by Republicans to get rid of Social Security (and Medicare and Medicaid). By gutting these funds, they will have the money for huge giveaways to the rich (and especially the super-rich).

They have always been the party of and for the rich. They really don’t care about the needs of the poor, the working class, or the middle class.

This attack on Social Security proves that.

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Trump’s Art Of The Deal Hurts Sales Of The F-35

The Daily Escape:

The Black Pearl, Outer Banks, NC – March 2025 photo by Jim Feaster

Several countries are reconsidering procurement of Lockheed’s F-35 fighter given Trump’s unreliability as a military partner. Many but not all, are NATO partners, like Germany, Canada and Portugal and Turkey. It seems clear that Trump doesn’t understand NATO is basically a captive export market for US war products!

Take Germany:

“As the rift between the United States and the European Union continues to widen, German security experts are concerned that the Donald Trump administration could pull a “kill switch” on the F-35 Lightning II fighters that Germany is acquiring from the US. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany decided to procure 35 F-35 jets from the United States in March 2022, along with missiles and other armaments, for about 10 billion euros (US$10.89 billion).

A kill switch is typically believed to be a software-based backdoor mechanism which could be used by the supplier of a technology to disable or deteriorate the operation of a system, in this particular case, the F-35 stealth fighter jets.”

Or Canada:

“Canada is actively looking at potential alternatives to the US-built F-35 stealth fighter and will hold conversations with rival aircraft makers, Defence Minister Bill Blair said late Friday, just hours after being reappointed to the post as part of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new cabinet… The re-examination in this country is taking place amid the bruising political fight with the Trump administration over tariffs and threats from the American president to annex Canada by economic force….

There has been a groundswell of support among Canadians to kill the $19-billion purchase and find aircraft other than those manufactured and maintained in the United States.”

Or Portugal:

“Portugal is getting cold feet about replacing its US-made F-16 fighter jets with more modern F-35s because of Donald Trump — in one of the first examples of the US president undermining a potential lucrative arms deal.”

The country’s air force has recommended buying Lockheed Martin F-35s, but when outgoing Defense Minister was asked by Portuguese media Público whether the government would follow that recommendation, he replied:

“We cannot ignore the geopolitical environment in our choices. The recent position of the United States, in the context of NATO … must make us think about the best options, because the predictability of our allies is a greater asset to take into account.”

The ministry added a series of criteria that will be considered by Lisbon, including: “The geopolitical context” and “The extent of restrictions on the use of aircraft.”(Kill switch)

Or Turkey:

“Turkey has submitted a request to purchase 40 Typhoon fighter jets from BAE Systems….The request has been sent to the Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom, which is to make a decision on the sale of the aircraft and the export of British technology to Turkey.

The implementation of this potential export contract will be entrusted to the United Kingdom, namely to BAE Systems.

In 2022, Turkey began to consider the Eurofighter Typhoon as a temporary solution to modernize its air force, especially after the country’s original exclusion from the F-35 program and the ban on their sale due to Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system.”

The F-35 is a massive arms program that tied together the technological and military fortunes of the Global North and bound NATO to Northeast Asia and Australia. One of the key selling points of the aircraft is that it comes with the promise of US technological integration and US security support. Those things are now in jeopardy, even before Musk sinks his tentacles into the program.

There are already concerns about the US attaching “strings” to arms sales, even to our allies, and seeing the US disable certain capabilities of F-16s in Ukraine where Trump cut off intelligence and delivery of arms did nothing to encourage other nations to purchase our planes.

When US defense contractors develop new weapons, they game out how many orders they expect to receive, and over what time frame they can expect income from those sales. If they find out late in the game that the orders they expected are not going to come in, they may try to get the US DOD to pick up some of the development costs that would have been covered by late orders.

It will be curious to see the extent to which the kind of comments coming from the Portuguese, the Canadians and the Swiss (also claiming Trump an unreliable partner) show up in Wall Street analyst reports on Lockheed Martin and its many F-35 subcontractors.

Trump thinks he can force the world to do business on his terms. He’s going to impose tariffs on all countries and plans on easing tariffs on those countries that will do his bidding. “Play ball with me, and I’ll be nice to you. If you balk, you won’t be able to sell anything to me. I will isolate you, and the countries that play by my rules will isolate you and destroy your economy.”

He banks on having most countries accept his bullying as the cost of doing business with the US.

Wait until he finds out that countries have high quality options when it comes to buying weapons. It will take a generation to fix what Trump has destroyed in less than two months, starting with trust in America. They won’t want to vacation here, buy our products, or work with us because of one man who gets off on being a loud mouth and a bully.

It’s going to be a long four years.

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The Chaos Musk Go

Cartoon of the week:

Since the GOP won control of the House 2 years ago they have not passed a single appropriations package into law. That’s the primary job of the House of Representatives. Government has operated at funding levels set by Democrats two years ago via passing Continuing Resolutions every few months. This is not normal.

And it continued last week, just in a weirder way. From CNN:

“The House has voted to pass a stopgap funding bill just hours before a midnight deadline to avert a federal government shutdown. The Senate must next take up the bill. The vote was 366 to 34. Thirty-four Republicans voted against the bill, and one Democrat voted present. The bill would extend government funding into March and includes disaster relief and farming provisions, but does not include a suspension of the debt limit, which President-elect Donald Trump has been demanding Republicans address.”

The Senate passed the measure as expected just after midnight. And Biden signed it.

But, just two days ago, Trump and Musk threatened to ensure a primary challenge for any House Republican who voted for a bill that didn’t include a debt limit increase. On Friday, 170 of them took him up on just that.

Musk is now claiming that he’s really fine with all this. But back up two days to this from Robert Hubbell:

 “Musk ordered Republicans not to pass “any bill” until Trump is sworn in on January 20, 2025. If Republicans follow Musk’s command, there will be no government funding for a month (at least)–from Friday, December 20, 2024, through Monday, January 20, 2025. If that happens, chaos will ensue.”

And it got worse. Co-President Trump remained on the sidelines of the budget debate until after Musk tweeted “This bill should not pass.” Trump then posted a curveball:

 “Unless the Democrats terminate or substantially extend the Debt Ceiling now, I will fight ’till the end.”

The end happened way before the end, though. Increasing the debt ceiling is something that didn’t need to be done until June of 2025. But Trump didn’t want a debt ceiling increase to happen on his watch. The reason that Trump wanted to force a debt limit increase under Biden is that Trump needs that increase to pay for the proposed extensions of his 2017 tax cuts for millionaires and corporations. From The Hill, Lawmakers caught off guard by Trump debt ceiling demand: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) accused Trump of wanting Democrats ‘to agree to raise the debt ceiling so he can pass his massive corporate and billionaire tax cut without a problem.’….‘Shorter version: tax cut for billionaires or the government shuts down for Christmas,’ he added.”

The chaos caused by Musk foreshadows a second Trump administration with unelected, unaccountable billionaires mucking about in our politics. What could go wrong? With this kabuki, Hubbell thought this:

  • Trump looked like he is subordinate to Musk.
  • Musk has—for now—seized momentum from Trump as the dominant political force in the second Trump administration.
  • It is difficult to see how Mike Johnson survives as Speaker….Johnson has been humiliated and back-stabbed by Trump and Musk. Mike Johnson’s credibility with his own caucus and Democratic counterparts is non-existent. And some of that showed in the bill that was passed on Friday.

If you’re looking for a way to combat this, Democrats should publicly embarrass Trump about Musk. Call Musk the President-elect. Or the richer & smarter co-President; the one people really want to talk to. Trump will HATE it and might eventually ‘fire’ Musk. Remember, you can’t spell FELON without ELON.

We’re more than a decade now into the GOP’s performative politics of destruction. It gains power by touting its aim to break stuff and then runs into a brick wall when it’s forced to make the hard choices that come with holding power. Any GOP effort to govern at least temporarily is susceptible to being undermined by its many bomb throwers, now including Musk, who can exert leverage by striking a purer “blow it all up” posture than the rest of the GOP.

The events of the last week should give us hope that there are limits to the delusional, performative, grandiose claims and threats being peddled by Musk and Trump. They were losers in their first attempt of a smack-down with Congress. The lesson that the deficit hawks in the GOP should take from the tussle is that Trump and Musk are not as tough as they think.

In fact, it may signal the start of Trump’s “lame duck” presidency.

Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews accurately summed up the chaos we now find ourselves in. The question is whether non-elected officials should control funding the US government:

“The owner of a car company is controlling the House of Representatives from a social media app.”

What does it say about America that Elon Musk had to pay $44 billion to buy control of Twitter, but only $250 million in campaign contributions to Trump to buy control of the U.S. government?

This country is falling apart. Kind of like a Cybertruck.

Musk has to go.

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Democratic Party Messaging

The Daily Escape:

Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, CO – December 2024 photo by Monica Breckenridge.

The Democrats are meeting this week to decide on who will lead them into the 2026 midterms and the 2028 general election. Wrongo thinks it’s time for a revolution.

The key question is how do Democrats go back to winning presidential elections? And it may not be the way you think. From Jon V. Last:

“Since Trump’s emergence in 2016 the opposition has responded by acting as if it were still 2015. The Biden administration pursued a vigorous, bipartisan agenda filled with popular legislation designed to promote economic growth across the board. Biden spent money on infrastructure and manufacturing—much of it in red states and rural areas where Democrats had little support.

The Biden administration’s theory was that by governing from the center and focusing on employment and economic growth, Democrats could retain the support of the majority….”

But that theory didn’t work, and Trump won, running on zero ideas about growth, prosperity, or progress. His campaign was posited on the infliction of pain to outsiders. Trump didn’t promise to improve the lives of his voters. He promised to punish the people his voters wanted to hurt. That was the entirety of his electoral proposition, and none of it was subtext. Instead it was bold-face, ALL CAPS text.

Last says it worked because America has changed and the majority of voters are no longer motivated by wanting progress for themselves. Instead they’re motivated primarily by anger that out-groups—the people they do not like—might be succeeding or getting benefits they’re not getting.

If this is true, and at least some evidence suggests it is, how do Democrats persuade voters not to be quite so angry and to vote for them?  From Brian Beutler: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…winning the next election will require Democrats to persuade some as-yet unpersuaded voters that they’re worth voting for. Whatever policies Democrats think are popular, whatever affects they associate with normalness and affability, if they can’t do the delicate work of changing a mind, they can’t get anywhere.”

More:

“Democrats are about to have as little power as they’ve had at any time in the past two decades for a simple reason: Most Americans weren’t convinced that they’d be better off under Democratic rule. That’s it. And there’s no shortcut back to power that avoids the difficult task of convincing people to change their minds.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The Democrats need more and better communicators, and, crucially, it needs the people who don’t understand their potential to influence conventional wisdom and public opinion to get with the times. Most persuasion doesn’t happen person to person, it is mediated. When it does happen person to person, it is most often between people who already know each other, and usually one of those people is regurgitating ideas they picked up….And the ripest targets are no longer classic swing voters who are happy to talk politics with strangers….”

Couple all of this with the problem of where people get their news, and you have Dems digging out of a ditch partially of their own making. What Democrats are missing more than anything is creative thinking about how to reach people who will never answer a telephone call from a number they don’t recognize, never answer the door for a canvasser, and never form lasting political beliefs by watching or reading professional newscasts (because they rarely, if ever do).

This time around, Democrats either need their leaders to adapt, or else they need new leaders.

Jon Last thinks what will win votes in this environment is a lefty demagogue akin to what Bernie Sanders has been selling for years with his “millionaires and billionaires” rants. Sanders’s pitches resonated with younger voters. He got quite a lot of traction in 2016, but Democratic Party primary voters were not ready for him.

Who should the Dems support to lead them into the next round of elections? It should be a group of people in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. And thank God there is at least some movement among “younger” Democrats on the Hill to challenge the party’s gerontocracy.

Billy Ray is a screenwriter. His Captain Phillips screenplay earned him an Oscar nomination. He thinks the Democrats’ storytelling ought to start with:

“Whoever is going to be our next presidential candidate needs to look to the American people and say, ‘You matter. Not me, not Trump. You matter. You matter to your family, you matter to your community, you matter to your country,’” he adds. “‘You matter to our collective future, and you matter to me. And what I’m going to do for the next four years is just work for working families. I’m going to do the things that made the Democratic Party your party for so long.’”

Working families. Who among the Democrats out there can build on and carry this message home?

Evolve or Die, Dems.

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Hunter’s Pardon

The Daily Escape:

Eastham, MA mirror image, October 2024 photo by Bo Ericsson

Why are the media and the GOP so shocked and appalled at Hunter Biden’s pardon? It’s been called “the most consequential since Nixon”. Hunter was set to be sentenced and (probably) jailed this week. The seriousness of his likely sentence was disproportionately severe, largely because he was Joe Biden’s son.

Hunter lied on a form about being on drugs and he paid his taxes late. He entered into a plea deal in which he would admit guilt and get probation, a fair sentence. But the judge and the prosecution blew it up in court. He could have faced years in jail for crimes that someone not named Biden and who hadn’t also committed more serious crimes, would have ever been prosecuted.

On June 6, President Biden announced he would not pardon Hunter or commute any sentence he might receive for his gun-related conviction.

The President’s announcement in June was disappointing. While it was clear that felonies had been committed, the prosecution of Biden seemed motivated by something other than the pursuit of justice. And Hunter Biden was a recovering addict. His crimes, by his own admission, were the byproduct of his drug and alcohol abuse.

Biden has now pardoned Hunter and that was the right thing to do, because they brought the charges against Hunter to break Biden. As Biden said in the pardon statement:

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

The media and the GOP have reacted strongly.

On the one hand, people are concerned about a president issuing an unprecedented pardon for his child. But against the orgy of Trump pardons of family, friends, and advisers, Biden’s pardon of his son on minor charges pursued for political purposes seems like small potatoes to Wrongo. Biden’s reasons for pardoning his son are understandable. But Biden’s decision could be a precedent for future pardons—by presidents with flimsy or corrupt reasons for pardoning family members.

On the other hand, people have expressed the belief the Joe Biden did the right thing. Wrongo comes down closer to that side of that equation. The pardon process is supposed to be used to do justice. And this is justice. Hunter Biden would likely not have been charged on the facts if he was anyone else.

Biden exercised the pardon power; he hasn’t tried to pardon himself. He issued a pardon he was entitled to give. But it is a departure since he’s been so careful to avoid even the appearance of impropriety and said he would not pardon his son, to reverse course. That is reason to pause and reflect on this pardon.

Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger, after he completed a sentence for trafficking cocaine.

Will pardoning Hunter “embolden” Trump to break more norms? No, he will break them anyway. Trump didn’t need any excuse to pardon his henchmen. He’s already pardoned Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Jared Kushner’s father whom he just named to be the Ambassador to France! He’s pardoned Dinesh D’Souza and Joe Arpaio! A list of friends, allies and family.

It’s nonsense to think that pardoning Hunter changes anything when it comes to Trump.

Until the media uses the same yardstick to measure the actions by Biden against the actions by Trump, Wrongo is cheering for Joe. Trump’s actions are treated as somehow acceptable while incumbent GOP-ers clutch their pearls, or taking umbrage, at Biden. Democrats are being held to a totally different standard. It’s journalistic hypocrisy at its finest. And it does not serve democracy or America.

This ISN’T a two wrongs make a right situation. That Hunter Biden is not an admirable person in general has exactly nothing to do with any of this.

Let’s compare and contrast:

  • Hunter Biden was prosecuted mostly because his father is POTUS, and for actions that nobody else is ever been criminally prosecuted for. His plea bargain was rejected only because his father is POTUS. That is the very definition of political persecution.
  • OTOH, Trump was charged with extremely serious crimes: theft of secret documents and a failed coup d’etat are the most serious crimes anybody can commit against the body politic. And he is the only person to have been so charged, because no one else has ever committed such crimes.
  • Charging him wasn’t political persecution, despite Trump’s moaning that it was. While the Republicans spent the last six years trying to make Hunter a political albatross for Biden.

While Trump “whataboutism” is an exhausting game, the hypocrisy of the Republicans and the double standard of the media is galling. Those who supported Trump’s pardons of his political cronies for crimes that involved his own campaign, should have no critique of Biden’s pardon.

The Dems have to stop being the pearl clutching Party. Most voters do not care about Hunter Biden. We should remain on the high moral ground, and firmly assert and argue that the Biden pardon of his son was the moral thing to do despite the hand wringing from the press and others.

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Resist, No Matter What

The Daily Escape:

We’ve got to stop awfulizing. That is, reacting to every Trump move as if it is the worst thing he’s come up with yet and then jumping on social media to scream about it. We need to take a step back and remind ourselves that it has only been 12 days since the election, even though it feels like a lifetime. People have zero patience: their reserves are running low and it’s easy to lash out at the latest Trump outrage. We need to continue to take some time to process what’s happened.

We need to plan our resistance carefully. Not all battles are winnable or even worth the many calories it takes to pursue the fight.

America is different now than it was in 2015 at the dawn of the Trump era. Trump didn’t just win politically; he’s won culturally. We need to reckon with that. There’s no way around it: the results of this presidential election sucked. But when you look at some the other races and questions that were on voters’ ballots, the picture looks at least a little brighter. There were some good things that Democrats scored on Election Day:

  • Voters protected abortion access via ballot measures in seven states. And in Florida, it won a majority of the vote but just fell short of the 60% needed for passage.
  • Alaska and Missouri raised the minimum wage via ballot measure, while Missouri also implemented paid sick leave. Pro-worker policies are popular across the country, and Democrats who run on them can win even in red areas.
  • Swing state Democrats performed well. In North Carolina, Democrats won five statewide races and broke the GOP’s supermajority in the legislature. In Pennsylvania, Democrats retained their majorities.

But we should also take note of the apathy of the American public. Approximately 245 million people were eligible to vote this year; approximately 90 million of them didn’t. That is a plurality of Americans who didn’t vote.

In five of the last seven presidential elections, the change candidate has won. At least one Congressional chamber has flipped in the last four elections. We need to think deeply about what went wrong in the last election:

  • Democrats rarely talked about a vision for improving family life. Instead we ceded that to Republicans.
  • We rarely talked about how poor the economy was for the average person.
  • We couldn’t make inroads into the male voting population. In fact, we lost ground with Black and Hispanic men.

According to the AP, Harris had an advantage among women, winning 53% to Trump’s 46%, but that margin was narrower than Biden’s in 2020. In 2020, Biden won 55% of women, while 43% went for Trump. Women under 30 voted for Harris over Trump, but it was a somewhat smaller majority supporting her, at 58%, than Biden in 2020, at 65%. About 9 in 10 Black women and 6 in 10 Latina women backed Harris.

Just under half of white women supported the vice president.

Wrongo’s having a hard time figuring out why women voters did not turn out in bigger numbers in this election for Harris. That women’s rights were part of the stakes this year made it seem obvious that women voters would drive this election. And yet, 46% of women cast a vote for Trump.

We elect women governors, for both Parties, currently the ratio is 8 Dem to 4 GOP. But why not elect them to the presidency, when in many other western countries it’s considered completely routine to elect both women or men to the top spot? What is different about the US?

We’ve tried twice to elect a woman without success. There’s no one reason why Harris did not win. But inflation, which was as big a problem of this magnitude when Jimmy Carter was President, had a lot to do with it. Along with deeply ingrained racism and the framing of our elections as just another form of consumerism, i.e. who you would rather have a beer with.

Republicans now control all three branches of government. They’ve become responsible for everything people hate about politics. Our top political priority is to try to become credible change agents. It’s the first step to winning back the voters we’ve lost.

Wrongo’s late brother Kevin always signed off his emails with “Resist, no matter what”. He was a libertarian, but it works for liberals as well.

David Remnick in the New Yorker spoke about Vaclav Havel and how he resisted:

“During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected President….Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here.

The key question is can we resist like Havel?

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Trump

The Daily Escape:

Bobbing for Cranberries? Or just beaks under water? Wellfleet, MA – October 2024 photo by Greg Anderson

Like it or not, Trump is set to become one of the US’s most consequential leaders. Wrongo understands that for many Americans, including he and Ms. Right, the guy is repulsive beyond any need to speak about it. But unfortunately, that isn’t the case for most of our countrymen, who find him acceptable and preferable to a Democrat, despite all the criminality and the coarseness.

How did Wrongo and the Democrats get it so wrong? What about Trump’s skill set and capabilities did he and the Dems miss that 51+% of the voters clearly perceived as strengths? As important, how will Democrats get through the next four years? That’s hard to say. What have Democrats learned that they can carry forward to a better day down the road?

In a way, time will pass quickly. It surprised Wrongo that Trump’s first term passed by as quickly as it did. That was in part because of Covid and the myriad other problems that kept us distracted, from debating the next outrage that Trump laid on the table.

That is how the next four years will go by too. But the question is, does the country survive as a unified entity? Wrongo isn’t optimistic about the next four years. In fact, he’s filled with sadness about what might have been. Sitting here today, he’s unable to see a way forward.

But we have to start by admitting that the Dems have a huge marketing problem. Our ideas were rejected, our view of the future was rejected and our candidates were rejected as well. It’s a bit like the board of directors of the now mostly defunct Howard Johnson restaurant chain, looking out of the board room window across the street at a new McDonald’s and saying, “those golden arches will never replace our orange roofs.”

But they did. Quickly.

We have to admit that whatever Trump is, that’s what the American people want; even if it comes with his personal dominance of whatever the issue, the specific person, or the rest of us.

So Dems have a marketing problem. Too few people want what we have on offer. Here’s an illustration of how bad it really is: This chart from the Financial Times shows how Trump improved his margin from 2020 to 2024 in all US states but 2:

The data are preliminary, but unlikely to change. Yes, you are reading that right: Trump improved on his 2020 showing in 48 of the 50 states. And in many strongly Democratic states: In California, New York, and Illinois, Trump improved by very large numbers.

New Jersey is the most shocking: In 2020, Trump lost the Garden State by 16 points (57%-41%) to Joe Biden. On Tuesday Trump came within 5 points of beating Harris (51.5%-46.5%). An 11-point improvement in four years!

The hot takes about the election including mine, aren’t worth much today. This election seems so inexplicable that maybe there’s something bigger behind this than normal politics.

It remains to be seen whether or not reports of this country’s demise are greatly exaggerated. On the demise side, a majority of Americans on Tuesday chose Trump. They handed unchecked power to a narcissistic criminal demagogue because the price of bacon and milk increased.

They may also, in fact, have surrendered their sovereignty without firing a shot.

Democrats need time to make sense of what happened and to try to figure out what it will take to offer people what they need in four years. And 2024 was going to be a very difficult election to win no matter what. And in 2024 so far, nobody across the ideological spectrum has been able to crack the “voters hate inflation” code. At least, that’s one sure takeaway from the election results. No matter what policies and promises were made, lies told, or insults and threats, people couldn’t get over paying $7.00 for a gallon of milk when it cost $3.50 five years ago.

It didn’t matter that wages kept pace with inflation. It didn’t matter…And what will matter over the next four years?

This is a difficult time, and many may not want to hear about the future. Stop for a breath and take your time in returning to the fight.

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