There’s a story that Trumpists tell about 2020.
The mass protests of that summer were a missed opportunity; Trump, having been thwarted in his desire to call out the military, was too kind. The left took that as an opportunity to riot. In MAGA cosmology, violent protestors then torched cities; the Biden “regime” followed on by spreading a poisonous ideology bent on dividing and demeaning the country.
Continue reading “Redoing 2020?”My wording in this title is one part provocation. But there is a serious point to it.
American political debates use the term “elite” in a fairly impoverished way. Its use is pejorative rather than descriptive. The elites are the bad guys. And the good elites aren’t actually elites. We’re all familiar with this and perhaps it’s inevitable in a political culture so rooted in the imagery and ideology, if not always the reality, of popular rule and the power and valorization of the ordinary American.
But the elite, in a more descriptive and non-evaluative sense, has been perhaps the biggest reveal of this live subject experiment we’ve been a part of since late January. Law firms, universities, big business, news publications and a million other examples. We’ve all been amazed, disheartened, aghast, whatever you want to call it, by the subservience of the prominent and the powerful. Even those who haven’t adopted a posture of subservience have generally adopted one of silence. I hear it from reporter after reporter. The kind of people they used to go to for quotes — a lot of those people don’t want to give them anymore. And, beyond moral evaluation, we know why: they have things on the line. A rogue President has vast untapped and illegal or unconstitutional but still usable power to come after really anyone who puts their head up. The challenges to Trump have much more been waged by ordinary Americans.
Continue reading “The Trumpian Elite”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Heading into a weekend of planned nationwide protests against the authoritarianism of President Donald Trump, right-wing figures in politics and law enforcement seem almost giddy at the prospect of protests turning into riots that they can crack down on ruthlessly.
When they’re not conflating all protests with rioting, some right-wing officials have been using the tableau of street demonstrations to preen as tough guys ready to crack heads. The posturing is almost certainly fueled by the overblown right-wing coverage of the sporadic rioting in Los Angeles that depicts a metro area of 18 million people as under siege.
Taking President Trump’s lead, the GOP governors in Texas and Missouri have activated their national guards ahead of the expected protests this weekend.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) hasn’t activated the Florida National Guard, but he tried to embody the snarling “Make my day” ethos of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, telling a conservative podcast host:
If you’re driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety. And so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault for impinging on you.
Elsewhere in Florida, Brevard County officials held a press conference with the tagline: “Florida: The Anti-Riot State.” After acknowledging the right to protest, the local sheriff launched into tough guy mode with a threatening rundown of the things his deputies would do to protestors who engage in violence:
Earlier in the week, the sheriff in Mobile County, Alabama promised it would be a busy weekend for local “orthopedic hand surgeons” if protestors break the perimeter his deputies set. The controversy over his remarks prompted him to issue a somewhat conciliatory statement, noting that he had been asked about the rioting in Los Angeles coming to Mobile:
It is important to clarify that I do not anticipate any such events taking place here. Our past experiences with protests in Mobile have shown them to be peaceful and organized, and I have no reason to believe this weekend’s rally will be any different.
The right-wing reactivity comes after years of overheated rhetoric, disinformation, and demonization directed toward the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, some of which did including rioting, vandalism, and persistent civil unrest. In the ensuing years, the BLM protests became shorthand on the right for left-wing and Antifa violence and morphed into a rationale and excuse for the Jan. 6 attack.
In addition to the ideological edge, there’s a provincial element to some of this. Law enforcement in bigger cities where large crowds more frequently gather have more experience with keeping temperatures down and deescalating things before they get out of hand. Smaller communities and more rural areas have less experience with crowd control, but there’s also the frisson of a big national event touching close to home in some way, however tenuous. You might remember local police being inundated in the summer of 2020 with complaints and tips fueled by crazy rumors and online misinformation circulating on social media about Antifa invaders.
Stay cool this weekend.
In a rapid series of events late yesterday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer held a hearing on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit challenging President Trump’s takeover of the state National Guard, issued a temporary restraining order blocking the move, at which point the Trump administration appealed the order to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which quickly issued an administrative stay last night.
For now, the National Guard deployment will continue through the weekend, with an appeals court hearing scheduled for Tuesday.
Testifying to the House Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cast doubt on whether the administration would comply with lower courts order reining in President Trump’s use of the National Guard but said he would abide by a Supreme Court decision. Hegseth’s comments came before the flurry of court actions later in the day in the California National Guard case.
I haven’t focused on the case of Harvard researcher Kseniia Petrova because it doesn’t have the same First Amendment implications of the student protestor deportations or the structural constitutional implication of the Alien Enemies Act and adjacent “facilitate” cases. It just stands for the Trump administration being really shitty.
Petrova’s visa was revoked when she allegedly tried to bring undeclared frog embryos through customs at Boston’s Logan Airport. The Trump administration wants to deport her to Russia, where she fears reprisals for her earlier political activism. When she challenged the immigration proceedings, the Trump administration drummed up smuggling charges against her for the frog embryo incident.
Yesterday, after four months in detention, Petrova was released by agreement of the parties while the criminal and immigrations cases proceed.
“He’s a sadist, but not in any fun way …”–Brian Beutler on Stephen Miller
Two officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 have sued to try to enforce a law calling for the installation on the West Front of a plaque honoring law enforcement’s efforts that day. The House GOP has no apparent plans to put it up.
On a 214-212 vote, House Republicans passed a $9.4 billion rescissions bill that enshrines President Trump’s unlawful impoundment of federal spending, including cuts to foreign aid and PBS/NPR – but only after two GOP holdout were cajoled into supporting the measure.
OMB Director Russell Vought has another funding freeze-rescission scheme in the works, covering some $30 billion in funding for EPA, NOAA, HHS, and other agencies, Politico reports.
A new CBO analysis shows how deeply regressive the Trump centerpiece legislation is, an unprecedented one-two punch of tax cuts for high earners and spending cuts for lower income Americans:
In memory of Brian Wilson:
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For months during the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised to use the military domestically. His campaign telegraphed it via news coverage and reports from friendly nonprofits; Trump mused about using soldiers against protests. After he defeated Kamala Harris, the then-President-elect reminded everyone that he wanted to see “military assets” used as an adjunct to mass deportations.
Continue reading “Judge Orders Trump To Return Control Of National Guard To Newsom”From 30,000 feet, the trendlines for Democrats are cataclysmic: Blue states, particularly the powerhouses of New York and California, are leaching population that’s being hoovered up by southern states, particularly Florida and Texas.
Continue reading “Headlines Scream That Democrats Are Doomed Come 2030—But The Reality Is Murkier”Just before Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was forcibly removed from a Department of Homeland Security press briefing, forced to the ground and then handcuffed for asking a question, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was in the middle of making a bizarre but crucial point.
Continue reading “Noem Says National Guard Occupation Is Meant To ‘Liberate’ LA From Its Mayor And Governor”I was driving when this afternoon’s events in Los Angeles took place. So I didn’t know about them in real time and only found out what had happened a couple hours later. (Appropriately enough, I was listening to the audiobook version of a Raymond Chandler novel.) Secretary Noem is now claiming that she, along with everyone else there, didn’t even know who Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was. This is even more absurd than you might imagine. The press conference was in Los Angeles and he’s one of the state’s two senators. More than that, he’s the ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration. Of course she knows who he is. If she doesn’t remember his face, she’s an even dumber degenerate punk than I already thought.
Continue reading “Trump Wants to Rule as a Dictator. Make Him Do It.”As many of you have probably noticed, TPM had significant downtime this afternoon. It turns out it wasn’t just us. Cloudflare had a series of broad outages this afternoon and TPM was downstream of that. About 20% of all websites use Cloudflare for core site functions (things like DDOS mitigation, proxying, DNS, caching, and some other things I’m sure I’m forgetting).
We’re back now and closely monitoring the situation. Our apologies for the interruption, and thanks as always for sticking with us.
House Republicans narrowly passed the rescission package President Donald Trump sent over last week to Congress in an effort to give an air of legitimacy to the Department of Government Efficiency’s rampage through the federal government.
Democratic leadership called out their Republican counterparts in a press conference ahead of the vote, criticizing House Republicans for getting in line behind the Trump administration’s constitutionally backwards effort to force the cuts down Congress’ throats.
Continue reading “Jeffries Calls Out Republicans For Ceding Their Authority To Trump In Rubber-Stamping DOGE Cuts”A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the L.A. protests and Trump’s big boy birthday parade.
Continue reading “Listen To This: Protest Politics”
