What has Trump done today?
Kennedy Center Bottoms Out: Ticket Sales Plummet, No Donations, Cancellations
Free school lunches are not Republican or Democratic lunches – they’re American because that’s who we are. Somewhere just a tad under those ideals comes the Kennedy Center, the new upstart competing with opera houses and symphonies around the world, and doing it very well. From its inception in the 1970s to now, it has been a source of national pride without regard to the party in power – no one thought to bring that agenda. The ideal is that arts, like science, education, and faith – inform politics, not the other way around. But all of the ideals above can be put at risk if the consequences of political overkill are ignored.
Yes, he promised to “destroy the government” – in a sense. There is the government we all see on television, Congress, the EPA, the FDA, etc. And then there is the government we don’t see until we need them, the person who picks up the phone at Social Security, the local school administrator that bills a federal fund for the cafeteria’s food, the VA hospital. No one asked anyone to touch that part of the government that everyone expected to simply “work.” Going even further, there’s still another level – government that few even consider government, the air traffic controllers, the park rangers – the Kennedy Center.
There is no utopia waiting on the other side of Trump's economy
Canadian Sovereignty, Digital and Geographic
Putting the Reconciliation Resolution in Context-2025-03-11
“For context, a $2.8 trillion reconciliation bill – with nearly all the borrowing between 2026 and 2034 – would:
- Equal more than all spending programs except for the Social Security retirement program, Medicare, Medicaid, net interest, veterans’ and defense spending.
- Equal two times as much as Medicare Part D, almost three times as much as the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, and five times as much as foreign aid from USAID and the State Department.
- Add more to the deficit than any legislation enacted in the past decade, including 50 percent more than the American Rescue Plan Act, twice as much as the original Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and seven times as much as the bipartisan infrastructure law”
Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups
Conservatives now just 1 point ahead of Liberals: Nanos
Conservatives' 25-point lead over Canada's liberal party evaporated, seemingly in response to Trump's antagonism toward Canada
Trump’s Latest Weapon Against Critics: Destroying Their Lawyers
Trump executive order kneecapping a prominent law firm
The Trump Administration Said These Aid Programs Saved Lives. It Canceled Them Anyway.
Dismantling the Department of Education.
So, we’ll “defund” the department, but the money will “keep flowing.” We’ll “dismantle” it, but really redistribute its programs across the government. We’ll “eliminate” it, but actually reassign its various responsibilities to other agencies. When you add that actually eliminating ED will require an act of Congress and 60 Senate votes (as Ramesh Ponnuru wrote under “What the right is saying”), what actually ends up happening is not at all clear to me.
Defund ED? Who would teach? Who would create curriculums? How would our public schools stay funded?
I was subsequently surprised to learn then that ED has very little to do with curriculum or employing teachers, and that its role in funding public schools is fractional.
The Department of Education is responsible for about 14% of all funding that goes to our K–12 schools, and at the same time the department’s reach into state and local education has gone incredibly far. Through the power of the purse, the Education Department now wields a great deal of influence over how parents, teachers, and schools behave. At the same time, a lot of what ED does could be easily moved to other departments (for instance, I think it’s pretty easy to argue that ED’s Office for Civil Rights could move to the Department of Justice).
Some writers, like Cato’s Neal McCluskey, have made straightforward arguments that we don’t need a federal education agency when the federal government isn’t allowed to regulate education, and that the department itself is neither competent nor effective. At the very least, I think one of ED’s biggest responsibilities — its federal student loan programs — has gotten completely out of control. When higher-education costs have exploded and the president responds to those costs by forgiving hundreds of billions in student debt, moving that responsibility somewhere else makes sense. Writers on the left and right have made the case that the Treasury would be better suited to manage and oversee student loans, and I’m inclined to agree with them.
my general view is that ED is not really emblematic of a thriving, successful expansion of federal government — and while trying to “delete” it with Musk-level tact or care would be a disaster, I also think Congress (if it wanted) could significantly reduce ED’s role in American life, turn over its responsibilities to other federal agencies, and streamline a lot of the work it does as a department.
The problem with the current debate is that doing so wouldn’t really reduce the size of the federal government — and it wouldn’t save us all that much money, either. Instead, the administration would just create a whole lot of disruption, risk interrupting popular services, and probably lose the political debate in the public square — all to simply pass on one department’s responsibilities to others.
America, the final season
Trump, early on, dropped any last vestiges of what a modern political campaign should look like, continuing to stump in rallies across swing states, even after multiple assassination attempts forced the former president to encase himself in a cube of agony. He whittled down his campaign into a simple message: “I will make you wealthy and hurt everyone you hate.”
unlike the Harris campaign, he only relied on the internet for propaganda, following his son Barron’s advice, who reportedly was the one pushing him to spend his time doing manosphere podcast interviews. Meanwhile, his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, gave him an important line to Silicon Valley’s most radicalized CEOs and the country’s two most-brainrotted men, Elon Musk (metaphorical brainrot) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (literal brainrot).
In terms of what we can expect from Trump’s second term, conservatives have already laid out their blueprint online. They’ve spent the last four years reshaping the architecture of the social web to match their designs for American society at large. It has been easy to laugh off Musk’s purchase of Twitter and its subsequent drop into irrelevance. But irrelevance was never a bug, but a feature. Big Tech monopolists, many of whom are now congratulating Trump on his win today, have successfully created an internet of paranoid cul-de-sacs, where no one trusts each other and nothing can break through the noise.
Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to lead FBI.
I’m going to share seven quotes. Some of them are real things Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have said. Some of them are made up. Let’s see if you can spot the fake ones.
“We’re blessed by God to have Donald Trump be our juggernaut of justice, to be our leader, to be our continued warrior in the arena.”
“My recommendation is Donald Trump should ignore this [court order]... who is going to arrest him? The marshals? You guys know who the U.S. Marshals work for? The Department of Justice, that is under the — oh yeah, the executive branch. Donald Trump is going to order his own arrest? This is ridiculous.”
“The only thing that matters is power. That is all that matters. ‘No it doesn’t, we have a system of checks and balances.’ Ha! That’s a good one. That’s really funny. We do?”
“The irony about this for the scumbag commie libs is that the cold civil war they’re pushing for will end really badly for them. Libs are the biggest pussies I’ve ever seen and they use others to do their dirty work. Their mommas are still doing their laundry for them as they celebrate tonight that their long sought goal of the destruction of the Republic has been reached. But they’re not ready for what comes next.”
“My entire life now is about owning the libs.”
“And you've got to harness that following that Q [of QAnon] has garnered and just sort of tweak it a little bit. That's all I'm saying. He should get credit for all of the things he has accomplished, because it's hard to establish a movement."
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Just kidding. They’re all real.
1, 6, and 7 were things Kash Patel said. 2, 3, 4, and 5 are things Dan Bongino said.
Stop Analyzing Trump's Unhinged Ideas Like They're Normal Policy Proposals
Let's be clear about what's happening: The President of the United States is openly fantasizing about forcibly annexing a sovereign nation of 40 million people. He's been repeatedly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "Governor Trudeau" and threatening our closest ally with absorption into the United States. This isn't a policy proposal to be analyzed; it's the ravings of a dangerous authoritarian.
But instead of treating this story as what it is — evidence of Trump's increasingly unhinged worldview and contempt for democratic norms — Baker decides to play electoral college calculator. He walks us through detailed scenarios about House seats and Senate majorities, complete with expert quotes about the Democratic Party's theoretical gains. It's like writing about the thermal properties of the emperor's new clothes while ignoring his nakedness.
The real story here isn't about electoral math. It's about a sitting president who talks about invading allied nations while referring to their democratically elected leaders as though they were already his subordinates. It's about the continued deterioration of democratic norms. It's about how the institutions meant to protect democracy — including the press — seem increasingly unable or unwilling to call out authoritarian behavior for what it is.
The press needs to stop treating politics like a game of electoral mathematics and start treating it like what it is: a serious business with real consequences for democracy and human lives. When the president starts talking like a mad emperor, that's the story, not how many House seats his delusions might hypothetically affect.
Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Marginal REVOLUTION
Trumpian Policy as Cultural Policy Analysis: Trump's administrative actions and policy decisions are primarily driven by a strategy to reshape American culture rather than achieve specific policy outcomes, using controversial decisions to dominate public discourse and shift cultural narratives.
- The article analyzes Trump's policy approach as primarily a cultural strategy rather than traditional policy-making
Key aspects of this cultural policy approach:
- Focuses on highly visible, controversial decisions that generate widespread discussion
- Prioritizes cultural messaging over policy effectiveness or implementation
- Aims to control ideological agenda through rapid, multiple policy announcements
- Doesn't require policies to be legal, practical, or even implemented to achieve cultural impact
Specific examples:
- Executive orders against DEI and affirmative action as first actions
- Proposed renaming of Dulles Airport
- Bill to add Trump to Mount Rushmore
- Tariff threats against Canada and Mexico
- Changes to federal employment structure
- Elimination of Black History Month at Department of Defense
- Targeting of US AID
- Nomination of RFK Jr.
Strategic elements:
- Uses polarization to guarantee at least one-third public support
- Deliberately chooses well-known targets (like Canada/Mexico) for maximum cultural impact
- Creates debates that delegitimize existing institutions
- "Floods the zone" with multiple controversies to maintain constant cultural dialogue
Author's analysis:
- Strategy doesn't require coordinated planning
- Works through spontaneous order of competing interests
- Relies on three factors:
- Conflicting interest groups
- Competition for Trump's attention
- Trump's belief in cultural issues' importance
Effectiveness factors:
- Leverages internet-intensive, attention-based media environment
- Creates disorganization among opponents
- Uses negative contagion to reinforce cultural shifts
- Prioritizes cultural impact over policy success
HIV, transgender care, climate change and other federal websites go dark
President Trump's first days in office.
He’s identified real problems with our system and possesses the political will to pursue real change. Paired with a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, he could genuinely achieve what his predecessors could not and pass major immigration reform during his term. But the sweep of these actions — mobilizing the military, pausing asylum, halting the parole process, trying to end birthright citizenship — will incur far more costs than benefits. The innocent people who are trying to flee danger or persecution in their countries and immigrate to the United States legally out of a sincere motivation to better their lives, who often help our country grow and stimulate our economy, will be caught in the machinery of these changes. All told, these executive actions are a step in the wrong direction.
Our system tends to exacerbate criminal behavior more than rehabilitate it, and the United States uses imprisonment as a punishment far more often than is productive or necessary. When it comes to the January 6 defendants, I fully support consequences for those who broke the law, but I also believe the Justice Department acted improperly in how it handled many cases.
The biggest example of this prosecutorial overreach came in a recent Supreme Court ruling that found the DOJ wrongly charged hundreds of rioters under an obstruction of justice statute that elevated the severity of their cases. This case did not fall along ideological lines; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority in the 6-3 decision, while Amy Coney Barrett dissented. At the time the ruling came down, roughly 50 defendants had been convicted and sentenced on that obstruction charge alone, and 27 of them were incarcerated.
The president pardoned the vast majority of the convicted rioters of all wrongdoing in a sweeping manner, with an apparent lack of knowledge of or care for the crimes he was excusing and without expressing any remorse for the pivotal role he played on that day.
Trump withdraws from the Paris Agreement and WHO.
While Trump can justify his decisions based on some of the recent failures of the WHO and the Paris Agreement, the withdrawals still carry significant risks for public health and climate change mitigation, which the Trump administration has not shown a plan to address.
Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement won’t affect our climate change outlook much, but it is a missed opportunity to redirect U.S. climate policy toward a more realistic objective. The treaty’s goal of keeping global surface temperatures to roughly 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels is now practically unattainable after record-hot years in 2023 and 2024, and its secondary 2°C goal also appears to be in peril — a 2024 UN Environment Programme report stated that “emissions must fall 28 per cent by 2030 and 37 per cent from 2019 levels by 2035” to maintain the 2°C goal. Achieving those reductions would undoubtedly require massive, destabilizing changes to economic systems, which are neither desirable nor plausible.
However, that provides more justification for the United States to stay in, not to drop out of, the agreement. In his executive order announcing the withdrawal from the Paris accords, Trump even said the U.S. must play “a leadership role in global efforts to protect the environment” — but how can we lead from the sidelines? Withdrawing is a huge missed opportunity to direct international climate policy towards its biggest problems: China’s rise and finding alternative fuel sources.
Domestically, Trump is also missing a large opportunity to combine a center-right "all of the above" energy policy with a center-left "abundance agenda," one that maintains a seat at the table for petroleum and natural gas while we continue to invest in renewable technologies. Nuclear energy should also be part of this effort, and its adoption is squarely in line with both the Trump administration and Paris Agreement’s goals.
The WHO does critical work tracking new disease outbreaks and identifying emerging pathogens, and the U.S. withdrawal threatens its ability to aid this work and maintain the benefits we all receive from it.
Furthermore, our status as a global health leader within WHO is smart diplomacy and advances our national security interests. We can guide ongoing efforts to eradicate polio, protect children from diseases, and mitigate future outbreaks. We also receive benefits, like communications on transnational spread of dangerous viruses, scientific collaboration for each year’s seasonal flu vaccine, and access to information about emerging threats. Lastly, we can investigate global threats, as we did when U.S. scientists joined the WHO delegation that visited China in February 2020 to assess its Covid response.
Both Trump and public health experts have rightly criticized the effusive praise the WHO heaped on China in the early days of the pandemic, even as questions swirled about how the virus spread. In a critical moment for its mission, the WHO seemed more occupied with keeping China happy than fulfilling its obligations to the rest of the world. The organization also failed to acknowledge that Covid was airborne early on, providing more evidence that it was ill-prepared to meet the moment.
Trump is right that the U.S. contributes a disproportionate amount to the WHO compared to China (even though he has exaggerated the magnitude of that difference), and we should push for fairer standards. While it is now starting to diversify its revenue sources, the organization’s reliance on the U.S. is evident in the measures it has already taken since Trump announced the withdrawal order — freezing recruitment and drastically scaling back its travel budget.
With all these issues in mind, leaving the WHO is still not the answer; in fact, leaving will make our problems worse. In our absence, China would likely seek to step up to mold decisions to its will — how does that help the U.S.? If Trump wants to play tough with the WHO, why not stay involved but slash our funding commitments?
Trump’s new economic war
Saudi Arabia and other producers must cut oil prices, global central banks “immediately” needed to slash interest rates, and foreign companies must ramp up investments in US factories or face tariffs. The EU — which came in for particular opprobrium — must stop hitting big American technology companies with competition fines.
Trump’s demands came amid a frenetic first week in office in which the president launched a blitzkrieg of executive orders and announcements intended not just to reshape the state but also assert America’s economic and commercial supremacy. Tariffs of up to 25 per cent could be slapped on Canada and Mexico as early as February 1, riding roughshod over the trade deal Trump himself negotiated in his first term.
China could face levies of up to 100 per cent if Beijing failed to agree on a deal to sell at least 50 per cent of the TikTok app to a US company, while the EU was told to purchase more American oil if it wanted to avoid tariffs. Underscoring the new American unilateralism, Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, as well as exiting the Paris climate accord for a second time.
This proposal throws a “hand grenade” at international tax policymaking, says Niels Johannesen, director of the Oxford university Centre for Business Taxation at Saïd Business School. The move suggests a determination to “shape other countries’ tax policy through coercion rather than through co-operation”, he adds.
“Those around Trump have had time to build up a systematic, methodological approach for protectionist trade policy and it shows,” says former UK trade department official Allie Renison, now at consultancy SEC Newgate. The approach will be to build up a case file of “evidence” against countries, she says, and then use it to extract concessions in areas of both economic and foreign policy.
The question remains how far Trump is willing to go. The danger of trampling on the rules-based order, says Jeromin Zettelmeyer, head of the Bruegel think-tank, is a complete breakdown in the diplomatic and legal channels for settling international disputes.
If Trump were to pull out of a wider range of international frameworks, such as the WTO or the IMF, he warns, then the arrangements that help govern the global economy could get “substantively destroyed”.
Some caution against being awestruck by Trump’s threats or his espousal of capitalism without limits, because his agenda was so incoherent.
“What we are seeing is huge doses of American hubris,” says Arancha González, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po. “We are blinded by the intensity of all the issues put on the table and by Trump’s conviction. But we are not looking at the contradictions. It’s like we are all on an orange drug
Column: Donald Trump is president again. Did you feel the vibe shift?
Pre-Trump American conservatism was dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: limited government, cultural traditionalism, antiabortion politics, fiscal rectitude and free market economics. Now, I’m the first to concede the right often fell short of its ideals, but showing rhetorical fealty to the ideals was the binding firmament of conservatism. Those commitments still get some lip-service, but there’s no denying that on all of these fronts, loyalty to Trump is the more pressing litmus test. This has freed up Trump to move leftward on abortion, entitlements and economic policy generally.
Trump didn’t merely shatter the consensus on the right, he shattered the political consensus generally. Or maybe social media and those other trends were the battering rams and Trump merely benefited from the new landscape.
the bedrock assumptions about how politics “works” and the rules for what a politician can or can’t do, no longer seem operative. We’re all familiar with how his behavior has demonstrated that, but it’s also illuminated that the electorate itself is just different today. The FDR coalition is gone, the white working class is now operationally conservative, and the Latino and Black working classes are now seen as gettable by Republicans. The assumption that they are “natural Democrats” was obliterated in this election. Republicans have figured out how to talk to those constituencies.
Mark Zuckerberg Is Not Done With Politics – Pixel Envy
Journalists do not write the headlines; I hope the editor responsible for this one is soaked with regret. Zuckerberg is not “done with politics”. He is very much playing politics. He supported some more liberal causes when it was both politically acceptable and financially beneficial, something he has continued to do today, albeit by having no discernible principles. Do not mistake this for savviness or diplomacy, either. It is political correctness for the billionaire class.
MANAGING FINANCIAL INSTABILITY IN 2025
Managing Financial Instability Risks in 2025
Summary
- The analysis positions itself as a warning about economic warfare, not financial advice
Key threats identified:
- Alleged Russian influence over key US political figures including Trump and Musk
- Strategic goal to dismantle US through internal turmoil and financial destabilization
- Bitcoin characterized as an economic weapon in a zero-sum game
- Christian Nationalist alignment with plans to destroy dollar/Fed system
Immediate financial risks for 2025:
- Potential government shutdown due to no budget passage
- Proposed $2 trillion budget cuts by Musk
- US debt default risk as leverage for cuts
- Strategic Bitcoin Reserve proposal threatening dollar stability
Critical timeline identified:
- January 2 2025: Government runs out of money
- January 3: New Congress installation
- January 20: Treasury transition period
- May 2025: Potential default date ("X-Date")
Recommended defensive measures:
- Diversify holdings across bonds, real estate, gold/silver ETFs
- Avoid Bitcoin/crypto investments
- Contact representatives to oppose extreme measures
Additional considerations:
- Moving to another country unlikely to help financially
- Social Security potentially at risk
- Banking system likely to hold but spreading funds recommended
- Resolution depends on mainstream Republicans recognizing and countering these threats
Document context:
- Living document subject to updates
- Written by Dave Troy, presented as analysis of warfare operations
- Includes extensive bibliography and related articles
- Last updated November 16, 2024
One last look at why Harris lost the 2024 election.
"The fog of war" is an expression that describes uncertainty about your adversary's capabilities and intentions while in the middle of battle. But it's also an appropriate way to describe our knowledge and understanding of history while living through it.
Everyone in the media seems to want this election to be about the issue they care most about, or to find a way to answer “why Trump won” or “what happened to the Democratic party” in a few sentences. I think that kind of quick summation is impossible. Elections are always decided by a confluence of several factors, some more important than others, and today I’m trying to lay out those factors I suspect were most relevant. That’s the goal: not to give a single, definitive answer, but a holistic and overarching one.
A lot of people, including Democratic strategists, have tried to explain to voters why they shouldn’t feel this way. They've pointed to low unemployment, inflation dissipating, and GDP growth — traditional metrics for measuring economic success — as proof that Bidenomics was working. But these macro numbers didn’t soothe the reality of what was happening at the granular level. Very few Democrats, and very few pundits, seem to have grasped this.
it turned out that Trump's 2020 performance (even in a loss) was the beginning of a new trend, not a fluke. While Democrats were focused on winning back white working-class voters, they actually lost support among their traditionally more multiethnic base.
Don't Panic
the idea that the next Trump term will ruthlessly implement his awful agenda. For one thing, it’s hard to say that Trump has an agenda. He’s going to rattle the saber about the border and probably find some ways to beef up enforcement, although it’s hard to say to what effect. He seems really intent on this tariffs thing, but that’s an issue that’s going to prompt huge corporate resistance which will in turn create turmoil within the Republican coalition; it seems very unlikely that he’s going to get anything like what he wants at the scale he wants.
The Trump administration was a daily exercise in corruption, controversy, and scandal. Major admin officials seemed to resign by the day. As I won’t stop pointing out, Trump’s signature policy objective (according to him!) was Obamacare repeal, and he was incapable of getting it past his own party in Congress.
Trump's MAGA allies gloat Project 2025 "is the agenda"
Musk Turning Into the Mar-a-Lago ‘Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave’
Donald Trump’s Victory and the Politics of Inflation
I readily agreed that positive news about jobs, G.D.P., and Biden’s efforts to stimulate manufacturing investment—of which there was plenty—wasn’t receiving as much attention as it deserved, particularly compared with the voluminous coverage of inflation. But I also pointed to governments from across the political spectrum in other countries, such as Britain, Germany, and France, that had experienced big rises in consumer prices. Inflation, it seemed, was poison for all incumbents, regardless of their location or political affiliation.
According to the network exit poll, conducted by Edison Research, seventy-five per cent of the voters in last week’s election said that inflation had caused them moderate or severe hardship during the past year, and of this group about two-thirds voted for Donald Trump.
According to the Financial Times, “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years.”
Immigration, the culture war, Trump’s reprobate appeal, and other factors all fed into the mix. But anger at high prices clearly played an important role, which raises the question of what, if anything, the Biden Administration could have done to counteract the global anti-incumbency wave. This is a complex issue that can’t be fully addressed in a single column. But one place to start is at the White House itself, where staffers at the Council of Economic Advisers (C.E.A.) and the National Economic Council spent a lot of time analyzing the inflation spike and examining options to deal with it.
Why, despite falling inflation, was public sentiment about the economy and the President still so sour? “We quickly realized that wasn’t just about the inflation rate,” Ernie Tedeschi, a former chief economist at the C.E.A. who left the Administration earlier this year, told me. “People were still going to the store and seeing high egg prices and high milk prices.” Even when an inflationary period peters out, prices don’t magically return to where they were before it began.
Most U.S. economists, including those associated with the Biden White House, remain skeptical about the efficacy of price controls, which they believe can lead to serious distortions and shortages. “I try to be humble, but I don’t know how they would have helped,” Tedeschi said. “People complained about inflation. If we had done price controls, they would have complained about shortages. It would still have been pinned on the President.”
Even if there was no simple policy fix for the political problems facing the Biden Administration, could it have done a better job of addressing voters’ concerns rhetorically? William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Clinton Administration, said last week that Biden should have pivoted much earlier from emphasizing job creation to focussing on the cost of living. “He was trapped in a very traditional ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ mind-set,” Galston said. “It was a fundamental mistake.”
Though Biden’s record on G.D.P. growth and employment creation is genuinely praiseworthy—since January, 2021, the economy has added sixteen million jobs—there is perhaps something in this criticism. For a time, it did seem that the White House wasn’t sufficiently acknowledging the frustration and anger that the inflation spike had generated. Still, beginning last year, Biden spoke out a lot more about high prices, and he sought to place some of the responsibility on corporate graft. He announced measures to crack down on “junk fees,” and criticized “shrinkflation” and “price gouging”—getting very little credit for it in the media or anywhere else. The Administration also tried to advertise the pathbreaking steps it had taken, through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, to lower health-care costs: capping the price of insulin for retirees, empowering Medicare to negotiate the prices it pays for some drugs, and introducing limits on out-of-pocket costs.
After Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she vowed that reducing the cost of living would be her first priority. She also outlined a number of proposals designed to help low- and middle-income families, which included expanded child tax credits, a new subsidy for first-time home buyers, and allowing Medicare to help cover the cost of home care.
Ultimately, however, none of these things dislodged the public perception that over-all prices were still too high and that Biden and Harris, if not entirely responsible, were convenient vehicles for voters to take out their frustration on.
Trump says he’ll set up an anti-woke task force in US military to monitor generals
‘The Interview’: Nancy Pelosi Insists the Election Was Not a Rebuke of the Democrats
I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Biden than came under Donald Trump. It’s clarity of the message, and if that’s what Bernie’s talking about, and that’s what Joe Manchin’s talking about, we weren’t clear in our message as to what things are, then I agree with that. And that was one of the concerns I expressed about saying we haven’t put forth what was done. It’s our legacy, too. [Pelosi bangs on the table.] The rescue package. [Pelosi bangs on the table.] Infrastructure Bill. [Pelosi bangs on the table again.] The CHIPS Act. But that didn’t come across as well as it should have. So I think if you’re talking about messaging, you’re talking about communications, that’s one thing. If you’re talking about what we stand for versus what they stand for, the public’s in for a big surprise.
I think that any vice president is, like it or not, tied to the record of the president. I think what Biden did was great, and being tied to his record is a great thing but not the way the record was perceived. This is a record of job creation. Sixteen million jobs as opposed to the record of her opponent who had the worst job-creation record since Herbert Hoover. Yes, 16 million jobs, turning around inflation, all the things that we did to build the infrastructure of America, reduce the cost of prescription drugs.
President Trump has promised to use the Justice Department and the attorney general to go after his perceived enemies. He has said that over and over again, and you’re one of them. Well, you would think that that would be enough reason for people not to vote for him. But that’s what he said. So when people say to me, “Why do you think our democracy is in danger?” I’ll say, well, let’s define our democracy. What is democracy? Free and fair elections? Peaceful transfer of power, independence of the judiciary, the rule of law, all of those kinds of things are part of a democracy. So if he’s going after those things, and thank God, the only, shall we say, peace of mind that we have today is that we don’t have the assault on the system that would have been there had Kamala Harris won. That isn’t right. It shouldn’t be that way. And that he would say — maybe thought it, might even want to do it, but to say it and the American people will say, “That’s OK with me ”?
Why millions voted for both Trump and progressive policies
Bernie Would Have Won
AI summary: This article argues that Trump's 2024 victory represents the triumph of right-wing populism over neoliberalism, enabled by Democratic Party leadership's deliberate suppression of Bernie Sanders' left-wing populist movement. The piece contends that by rejecting class-focused politics in favor of identity politics and neoliberal policies, Democrats created a vacuum that Trump's authoritarian populism filled.
Here’s a warning and an admonition written in January 2019 by author and organizer Jonathan Smucker: “If the Dem Party establishment succeeds in beating down the fresh leadership and bold vision that's stepping up, it will effectively enable the continued rise of authoritarianism. But they will not wake up and suddenly grasp this. It's on us to outmaneuver them and win.”
There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases.
But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.
The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people.
These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life.
On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.
Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures.
The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests
The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.
What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.
The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.
Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.