Gen. Mark A. Milley responds to Biden pardon: “My family and I are deeply grateful for the President’s action today. After forty-three years of faithful service in uniform to our Nation, protecting and defending the Constitution, I do not wish to spend whatever remaining time the Lord grants me fighting those who unjustly might seek retribution for perceived slights.”

TPM Reader JE flagged the statement to me.

I’m not one to tell people how they should react to or experience things. But for me I’m taking all of this in with a serene impassivity. They won. They’re entitled to their day. The Trump people have been signaling for days that they’re going to hit the ground running with what they describe as an executive “shock and awe.” I don’t see any reason to be shocked or awed. I don’t say this in any grand metaphysical sense. I mean that I’ve seen headstrong winners of close elections high on their own supply before. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, all of this is meant to hit you with so much sensory stimulus that you become overwhelmed. But the images you see wrapped around you in an iMax theater aren’t real. It’s still a movie.

Note this “for the ages” picture, above, of Jeff Bezos with the CEOs of Meta, Google and Apple from left to right, at an inaugural service feting Donald Trump this morning at St. John’s church across the street from the White House. You may not have a billion dollars but your dignity is all yours. No one can take it from you. Compared to some you can already be ahead of the game.

One step at a time. They’re not as big as they look.

Fascinating news this afternoon that CBS and its parent company Paramount are considering settling a lawsuit Trump filed against them late last year alleging “election interference” and demanding $10 billion in damages. We know there’s been a lot of this of late. ABC settled an incredibly weak case Trump brought over George Stephanopoulos’ correct use of the word “rape” to describe what a jury in New York concluded Trump had done to E. Jean Carroll. But there’s weak and there’s weak. The suit against CBS isn’t weak. It’s absurd. There’s no tort of editing. But Paramount is considering settling and generally going full Oprah cash & prizes for Donald Trump. This WSJ article, which broke the news, tells us what the issue is: CBS has a merger it’s trying to get approved. And the Trump team, including incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr (who has promised to abuse his power starting on day one), have made it clear that companies have to give Trump cash and prizes if they don’t want trouble.

CBS and Paramount have gotten the message.

I’m starting to get a strong Iraq War vibe about Greenland.

By this, I want to be clear, I don’t mean that I expect a catastrophic and ruinous U.S. invasion to take place. I’m referring to something different … but let’s just say: still not great. One of my strongest memories of those dark times 20-plus years ago was a peculiar dynamic that took hold in Washington after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The desire to invade Iraq was already a big thing in elite conservative circles in the late Clinton years. That was the origin of the “Iraq Liberation Act” of 1998. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration quickly made clear it wanted to overthrow the Iraqi regime either as retaliation for the attacks or as some sort of preemptive action to forestall future attacks. The ambiguity was of course an important tell about what and why any of this was happening.

I wanted to thank everyone who came out to our live audience taping of the podcast last night in DC. About 200 TPM Readers joined Kate and me in downtown DC where we discussed nomination hearings and more. We hope you had a great time. We definitely did. If you’re a regular podcast listener we’ll be posting last night’s edition, just a little later than usual. We expect to have it in your feeds sometime Friday afternoon.

This was our first time out doing one of these and we’ll be doing more of them. Later this year we’re going to try to do our first live event beyond the east coast. I know this can come off as some kind of east coast elitism. But really it’s logistical. We’re a very small organization. And we have staff in DC and New York. So we can scout out locations, set things up, have people in place to do all the little things that go into an event. Anywhere else is totally different and a different level of planning and resources. But we’re up for it. So we’ll be checking in with readers to see where the demand is — West Coast, Chicago, St. Louis, Texas or any of the gagilion other places in the USA … We have no idea. But somewhere off the eastern seaboard. So keep an eye out for that. And thank you again to everyone who came out. We truly appreciate it and we’re honored by your readership and support.

There’s a cottage industry of takes these days on how Democrats can again become the “party of the working class.” Many of those are reactive, defensive, operate on misleading or ill-considered concepts of what the 21st century working class even is. But today I had one of these pop into my inbox that I read and thought, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The gist is that Democrats should make themselves the party of gig workers. The title of the article is “Champion the Self-Employed.” But as author Will Norris explains, the demographic and economic profile of those technically categorized as “self-employed” has changed pretty dramatically in recent years. It still includes the generally high-earning and disproportionately white and male consultants and solo operators of various sorts. But as a group it’s now much, much larger — especially in the wake of the pandemic — and is more female and less white. It’s also much lower income, more precarious.

There are a few things that are critical to understanding the Trump Cabinet nominations and how Senate Democrats should approach them. The first and most important is that in the case of every nomination the question is entirely up to Republicans. Republicans have a three-seat majority. They have the vote of the Vice President in a tie. What happens or doesn’t happen is entirely a matter decided within the Republican caucus. It is totally out of Democrats’ control. What follows from that is that everything Democrats do, inside the hearing room or outside, is simply and solely a matter of raising the stakes of decisions Republicans make and raising those stakes for the next election. The aim isn’t for any Democratic senator to try to claw their way through the steel wall of Republican loyalty to Donald Trump. It’s to do everything they can to illustrate that Donald Trump staffs his administration with unqualified and/or dangerous toadies and that Senate Republicans are fine with this because they put loyalty to Trump over loyalty to country.

This all sounds obvious. And it is obvious. But people struggle to see the obvious as obvious. I’m seeing headlines and comments that Democrats failed to change the dynamic or knock any Republicans free. That’s a crazy standard since the dynamic is set. None of this is about whether Hegseth gets confirmed. Republicans control that. It’s about establishing the record Republicans will be running on in 2026 and the stakes for every Senate Republican in a competitive election.

Here’s a sort of update from the world of billionairedom. Today Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, was set to attempt its first launch of its hulking “New Glenn” rocket. But they’ve now scrubbed that attempt because of some technical issues and they’re going to try again on Thursday. Blue Origin is either 100% owned or near 100% owned by Bezos. It’s unclear whether some very limited equity may have gone to some early employees. But big picture: it’s Jeff Bezos’ company. It’s not part of Amazon or some public company. It’s his.

The company now seems to be Bezos’ main focus and he’s apparently relocated to Florida to give the company his especial attention. While all space technology is of interest to me, normally I wouldn’t be rooting for a new Bezos business venture. I have no particular beef with Bezos. But as we’ve seen repeatedly in recent months and years, what we might call the super-billionaires have way, way too much power. But in this case I’m really hoping this launch succeeds and that Blue Origin makes big strides in general.

I’m doing this post to explain why.

As the Hegseth hearings unfold, I wanted to give you a view into a small part of the story which, while perhaps not terribly consequential in itself, sheds some additional light on the Trump team’s effort to lock down details about Hegseth’s background as well as general press credulity about the same. This morning’s Axios reports that the Trump transition’s “red line” is that only Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI) should be briefed on Hegseth’s FBI background check, not the rest of the committee. “The Trump transition team is demanding the president-elect’s nominees be treated the same way they insist Joe Biden’s were,” it reads.

There’s currently a debate online about whether social media owners were always secretly or latently right wing or whether “progressives” took a business constituency that was a reliably friendly and financially generous ally and turned it into an enemy through relentless attacks. Needless to say, there are a lot of jangling threads to this story, details that are hard to wrestle into an overarching theory. There are Silicon Valley titans like Peter Thiel who have always been not simply right-wingers but advocates of weird, tech-infused neo-monarchism. There have also been various left-aligned campaigns that must have rankled various tech titans. And finally, it’s very important to remember that it’s not at all clear that Silicon Valley as a whole is moving right. Management is. But the real and big story is simpler and more structural. The major technology platforms became mature businesses at vast scales; in so doing they butted up against the regulatory purview of the national government; and with the former leading to the latter they shifted toward a more conventionally anti-regulatory politics. A lot of it is really that simple.

There’s an important additional, related point which is that on becoming mature businesses they began looking toward the federal government more and more to protect their business positions from new entrants or other threats.