“It might be helpful for you to know that you are not alone. And that in the long, twilight struggle which lies ahead of us, there is the possibility of hope.”
“The Long Twilight Struggle.” Babylon 5, created and written by J. Michael Straczynski, Season 2, Episode 20, 1995.
Here’s what I’ve found interesting:
- It is going to take more than signs on sticks to save our democracy;
- Why this isn’t the time for normal responses to the Musk-Trump regime;
- Trump’s advisors continue to attack veterans;
- How destroying our economy can serve the interests of Trump and the techbroligarchs;
- Democrats have ways to defeat Trump’s patrimonial regime change;
- A trade war provides an opportunity for countries to hurt big tech; and
- Let’s not allow Trump to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021, insurrection he instigated.
Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.
#1
Democrats can’t flashmob their way out of this one (Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, Link to Article)
This week, members of the opposition party filled the Capitol building with smoke grenades and tear gas canisters and hurled eggs at the ruling party, demanding an end to a regime that has held the country hostage for over a decade. Oh, wait, sorry, that was Serbia. In the US, our opposition party protested our current regime last night by wearing pink, holding up signs, and posting 22 identical TikTok videos. That’s fun. I think that’s what a lot of freshman orientations do now to welcome new students. I hope everyone had a nice time.
<snip>
Last night was really about the Democrats. A chance to show the country how they plan to respond to the Trump’s second administration. An opportunity, however small, to prove that they are both taking Trump and Musk’s coup seriously and also that they have a vision of how to reach voters in 2026 and 2028. And apparently, that vision is, uh, Ronald Reagan. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, in the Democratic Response after Trump’s address, told viewers, “As a cold war kid, I am thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980’s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War.” I fear that we are dangerously close to a Democrat starting a speech with, “As a 90s kid…”
The best take on the Democrats’ behavior last night was from @KrangTNelson, who wrote on X, “If you think Trump is a fascist, like Hitler was, then you have to accept that [wearing pink] is a ridiculous thing to do. ‘In response to hitler’s policies, some members of the German Left Party wore purple hats.’ Do you see how stupid that sounds?”
Though, @jeffsharlet.bsky.social had an equally good take, writing on Bluesky, “No, Democrats, these little auction signs aren’t it. You’re acting like Wes Anderson characters who don’t understand that they’re in a Tarantino movie.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I can’t imagine being more disappointed with the Senate and House Democratic Caucuses after what we experienced with President Trump’s deranged speech to the Joint Session of Congress.
Prioritizing decorum? Showing respect for the office of the presidency? A color-coordinated protest with at least four different colors? Small paddles with sayings on them? Celebrating Ronald Reagan in the official response? A Virginia Senator stating we owe Trump his due and should celebrate the progress being made on the border?
As Stephen Colbert observed during his live show monologue following the Trump speech:
“That is how you save democracy. By quietly dissenting — or bidding on an antique tea set, it was hard to tell what was going on.”
You aren’t doing it right if your protest can be compared to a weekend of antiquing.
It appears the Democratic leadership and their consultants have decided to sit back, hope Trump implodes, and scoop up the mythical centrist voters that haven’t materialized since I was a child.
So many of these elected officials and consultants who are complaining about decorum also love to quote the late Rep. John Lewis’ “make good trouble” statement. I suspect Lewis would have been joining Rep. Al Green in getting in good trouble to highlight Trump’s lies.
Democrats need to signal that none of what we are experiencing is normal—and that they are ready to lead the fight to protect this nation’s democratic experiment.
As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent explained, “Newsflash: It’s not OK for the American president to lie relentlessly about our allies and threaten them with economic Armageddon to bend them to his deranged, passing whims.” It is not normal to yell at a wartime ally in the Oval Office. It is not normal to have an unelected oligarch and his young acolytes violating the Constitution by canceling spending without Congressional authorization (leading to deaths around the world and the careless exposure of a CIA black site). It is not normal to pretend that an Executive Order can eliminate the Department of Education. It is not normal to remain quiet and seated when the president uses a Joint Session of Congress speech to call one of your colleagues “Pocahontas.”
Stopping this authoritarian takeover is going to require the public to get involved. That means taking some risks to get the public’s attention. Yep, public opinion matters! How are Democrats going to convince anyone by sitting down and being quiet? Democrats prioritizing decorum will only embolden those behind the Trump-Musk-Vance coup. We can color-coordinate ourselves right into the re-education camps.
It is time to throw sand in the gears of this government, at least until the Musk crime spree stops. No votes for a budget. No more helping the Republicans speed up the confirmation process (as they did for RFK Jr., Hegseth, Gabbard, and others). Democrats have agreed to more than 400 unanimous consent requests this session. That needs to stop now. Demand a quorum be present for business to continue. Republicans need to pay a price for what they are allowing the Musk-Trump regime to do. Time is a finite resource—make Republicans decide how they want to spend it.
We need to see that our political leaders are willing to fight for us. Trump is going to start blaming Democrats for anything that goes wrong because of what Musk and DOGE have done while gutting our federal agencies. Now would be a great time for Democrats to take Colbert’s advice and try to do something, at least out of self-preservation.
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#2
Democrats Are Acting Too Normal (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, Link to Article)
So what’s not to like? Slotkin—like so many in her party lately—failed to convey any sense of real urgency or alarm. Her speech could have been given in Trump’s first term, perhaps in 2017 or 2018, but we are no longer in that moment. The president’s address was so extreme, so full of bizarre claims and ideas, exaggerations and distortions and lies, that it should have called his fitness to serve into question. He preened about a Cabinet that includes some of the strangest, and least qualified, members in American history. Although his speech went exceptionally long, he said almost nothing of substance, and the few plans he put forward were mostly applause bait for his Republican sycophants in the room and his base at home.
It’s easy for me to sit in my living room in Rhode Island and suggest what others should say. But in her response, Slotkin failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics. As a former Republican, I nodded when Slotkin said that Ronald Reagan would be rolling in his grave at what Slotkin called the “spectacle” of last week’s Oval Office attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But is that really the message of a fighting opposition? Is it an effective rallying cry either to older voters or to a new generation to say, in effect, that Reagan—even now a polarizing figure—would have hated Trump? (Of course he would have.) Isn’t the threat facing America far greater than that?
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
As far as official responses go, Senator Slotkin did much better than average. However, it failed to meet what we need to see in this constitutional emergency.
Is the Musk-Trump regime a danger to the Republic or not? If it is (and I certainly believe it is), where is the urgency in opposing it? Where is the acknowledgment that our political leaders understand what is at stake?
It surprises me that there isn’t a larger group of 2028 presidential contenders rising to be the leaders of the opposition. One of my rules is that politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Yes, we are seeing a few, like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker take tentative steps. Some Senators are saying good things, but I can’t add them to a list until they start using their powers to slow down Senate proceedings.
Also, as a Gen Xer military brat, I have to disagree with Slotkin’s giving credit to Reagan for not losing the Cold War. I’ve covered this a few times in this space, but we were so lucky to survive the year 1983 (e.g. see story #9 in this newsletter). We owe Stanislav Petrov everything for his quick determination on September 26, 1983, that the Soviet early warning system was malfunctioning. That judgment prevented a likely massive Soviet nuclear response. Reagan’s actions that year, at least until he saw The Day After, made a nuclear exchange more likely.
So, no, Democrats don’t need to give Reagan any benefit of the doubt. His policies helped create Trumpism and MAGA. The last election demonstrated that there are not many voters who will change sides because a Democrat prioritized appreciating sane Republicans.
#3
Trump adviser Alina Habba says veterans fired by DOGE are perhaps ‘not fit to have a job at this moment’ (Rebecca Shabad, Allan Smith, Megan Lebowitz, Tara Prindiville and Natasha Korecki, NBC News, Link to Article)
Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn, Habba was asked about fired workers whom Democrats have invited to President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday night. Habba defended the cuts and said she had no sympathy for the thousands of people who have lost their jobs.
<snip>
“That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means,” she added. “We are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment, or not willing to come to work. And we can’t, you know, I wouldn’t take money from you and pay somebody and say, ‘Sorry, you know, they’re not going to come to work.’ It’s just not acceptable.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
What’s not acceptable is referring to Veterans and federal workers with this level of disdain.
So many Veterans supported Trump. So it seems to me that Democrats might want to do what they can to make sure they learn what Trump and his advisors think about them.
#4
I Know Exactly What They Are Doing (Jess Piper, The View from Rural Missouri, Link to Article)
I hear people all around me saying, “They are going to crash the economy. Surely they don’t mean to crash the economy.”
I beg to differ. This is curated failure.
Let me start off by saying that I am not an economist — I don’t even have a finance or accounting degree and I’m really bad at math in the first place.
But I do pay attention. I notice things and I am quick to see a pattern. I observe the world and the people in charge of it. I listen to the words they say and then measure those words against their actions.
You don’t need to be an economist to look around and see that the Trump administration is going to cause economic disaster — a recession or a depression. And it is by design. It is a feature, not a bug.
How do I know this?
I live under a GOP Supermajority. I have lived under their boot for two decades. They have economically damaged my state and it wasn’t by accident. They did it to sell off the state and workers and land to the wealthy. They created a desperate situation in Missouri and that desperation equates to bounty for the oligarchs.
The new Gilded Age. Make America desperate again.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Experts in authoritarianism have pointed out how much dictators love using crises to justify extraordinary measures and expand their power.
They declare that only they can fix it. Crises overwhelm people and prevent them from organizing and fighting back effectively.
Look at how quickly Trump and Musk have created economic problems. A trade war makes no economic sense, and firing so many federal employees across the country will lower economic activity.
Last week, the Atlanta Fed GDPNow model projected 2.3 percent economic growth for the first quarter of 2025. This week, that projection plummeted to -2.8 percent. Businesses hate uncertainty. How many times has Trump turned the trade war on and off in the first two months of his second term? How many invoices have been left unpaid? How many people are no longer going to pay taxes because they have lost their jobs? What is going to happen if Social Security is unable to pay benefits because of DOGE staffing cuts and technological interference?
People living in deep red states like Piper have experienced these shock doctrine tactics and seen government services and schools grow worse each year. Are we now going to see the United States forced into a recession—or worse—so oligarchs like Elon Musk can buy the scraps on the cheap?
Trump will try to blame Democrats and former President Joe Biden for any economic troubles. Fox News has already started spreading that lie. That’s one of the reasons Democrats must be more aggressive now to point the blame where it belongs before voters buy a false narrative.
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#5
One Word Describes Trump (Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic, Link to Article)
Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?
There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.
<snip>
Patrimonialism explains what might otherwise be puzzling. Every policy the president cares about is his personal property. Trump dropped the federal prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams because a pliant big-city mayor is a useful thing to have. He broke with 50 years of practice by treating the Justice Department as “his personal law firm.” He treats the enforcement of duly enacted statutes as optional—and, what’s more, claims the authority to indemnify lawbreakers. He halted proceedings against January 6 thugs and rioters because they are on his side. His agencies screen hires for loyalty to him rather than to the Constitution.
In Trump’s world, federal agencies are shut down on his say-so without so much as a nod to Congress. Henchmen with no statutory authority barge into agencies and take them over. A loyalist who had only ever managed two small nonprofits is chosen for the hardest management job in government. Conflicts of interest are tolerated if not outright blessed. Prosecutors and inspectors general are fired for doing their job. Thousands of civil servants are converted to employment at the president’s will. Former officials’ security protection is withdrawn because they are disloyal. The presidency itself is treated as a business opportunity.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
In all this, we can find opportunities. The fatal weaknesses of patrimonialism to which Rauch refers are the incompetence and corruption inherent in the system.
Corruption is something voters understand—and hate.
If Democrats are looking for a way to start messaging in this Constitutional emergency, corruption would be a great place to start. Trump is hosting private dinners at Mar-a-Lago for people who pay $5 million. Musk reportedly is trying to transfer an FAA technology contract that Verizon won to his Starlink company. Trump loves cryptocurrency now since he has personally benefited from it with the Trump meme coin. How much will Musk’s companies benefit from their access to the information the DOGE team has taken from federal agencies?
People understand how they don’t benefit from such corruption. Democrats need to point out all of the corruption and highlight the people who have lost jobs or contracts because of the insider dealing a patrimonial system requires. This would also be a great time to prohibit individual stock trading by members of Congress.
There is an opportunity here. Democrats should take it.
#6
Ideas Lying Around (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic, Link to Article)
Redistributing the means of production around the world is a necessary and urgent project, but it won’t be advanced through Trump’s rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade. Tariffs will cause breakdowns in neoliberalism’s fragile supply chains, and the ensuing chaos – mass unemployment, shortages, political rage – will make it even harder for countries (including the USA) to rebuild the productive capacity vaporized by 40 years of neoliberalism.
<snip>
But foreigners don’t have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America’s trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.
The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: “your margin is my opportunity.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
With Trump playing the stupid tariff card, Cory Doctorow explains how countries that signed free trade agreements with the USA now have an opportunity to stick it to big tech and help lower prices for users around the world.
How are Apple and Google able to force app developers to pay them a 30 percent fee on payments through their app stores? Why is it so difficult for people and businesses to fix their own electronics? Why is printer ink the most expensive liquid (up to $10,000 a gallon) people can purchase without a special license?
All of these horrors, and more, are possible because of ill-advised intellectual property protections granted to technology companies, starting with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 and expanding through provisions being included in free trade deals.
Doctorow explains how these IP rules mean no one can create a competing app store that charges developers less. He explains why farmers can’t use their equipment and have to wait for costly service calls. He explains why you can’t use third-party ink in HP and other printers.
But Trump’s tariff threats open the possibility of some countries deciding to no longer follow these rules since free trade access to the US market is not guaranteed. That would stick it to Trump and the techbroligarchs.
I hope some nation calls Trump’s tariff bluff. It would help consumers around the world.
The Reality of the January 6, 2021, Insurrection
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump instigated a violent insurrection against the United States government.
People were hurt and police officers died protecting the Capitol. Vice President Pence and other elected officials just barely escaped danger. Our national streak of peaceful transfers of power ended.
It was not, as Trump claims, a “day of love.” And we must resist his efforts to rewrite the history of that dark day.
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“Listen, if a Bad President can come in and take away our rights and we’re dependent on a Good President replacing them in four years to give us back our rights, then we do not have any rights.
If politicians can take or distribute them, then they’re not “inalienable” and they’re not “rights.”
We don’t have inalienable rights we have conditional privileges, divvied out according to the whims of whoever currently holds the reins.
And if we want to have actual rights, then we must build a system in which no one has the power to take them away to begin with.”—existennialmemes, Tumblr
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