Trumptatorship 2: Of Enemies, Alien & Domestic

This is the 2nd in a series of articles covering Donald Trump's efforts to end liberal democracy in the United States and replace it with authoritarian autocracy--a Trumptatorship. The 1st part, an introduction, is here.

As part of his fanatical crusade against immigrants, Trump has just invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which grants a president extraordinary powers to apprehend, detain, expel subjects of a foreign government with which the U.S. is at war. That last is a requirement--by law, the powers Trump is claiming require that either congress has declared war against a foreign government or that foreign government has invaded or otherwise attacked the U.S.. Neither of those things have happened; Trump's invocation of the law was aimed at--not making this up--a Venezuelan prison-gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA). It has no more legal validity than would a Trump declaration that he's now the hereditary monarch, but Trump has invoked the law, claimed those powers, asserted a version of them more extreme than has ever existed and then used them to rendition over 130 people, whom his regime arbitrarily accused of being foreigners and members of the gang, to a gulag in El Savador without any semblance of due process, without even so much as a hearing, in violation of both the law and an explicit court order not to rendition until the legal matters surrounding the Act had been addressed. The attacks on the court subsequently levied by Trump and his ghouls are specifically aimed at undermining the constitutional order itself, a full-bore effort to convert public support for that order into disdain for it.

As this writer documented at some length, Trump, in the 2024 cycle, went full Nazi on immigrants, directly appropriating the rhetoric of the Third Reich in describing them as disease-carriers, as "animals," as "savages," as "garbage," as "predators" who "rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill." And, infamously, eat your pets. He vowed he would "liberate... our entire nation from this mass migrant invasion of murderers and child predators and gang members, terrorists, drug dealers, and thugs." Trump made this one of his top campaign "issues." As I wrote at the time,

"One can point out that none of this is true, that all available data indicates that immigrants commit crimes at notably lower rates than the native-born, that even if one accepts "migrant crime" as a real presidential issue--and it isn't one--it's a microscopic one, that Trump's "sources," on the rare occasions when he even has any, don't at all support his assertions, but fact-checking such talk completely misses the point, which is to demonize and dehumanize brown untermenschen as a means of politically organizing Aryan voters around hating them... It's the fascism, stupid."

In mixed company, Trump would--in a game also often indulged by his apologists--sometimes take a step back and pretend to be opposed only to illegal immigrants, which wouldn't make any of his ugly rhetoric any better or defensible even if it was true, but, of course, it wasn't, and he was constantly betraying himself on the point. He embraced Nazi pseudoscience, saying immigrants commit murder because they're genetically predisposed to do so: "it's in their genes." He, in fact, repeatedly said immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our nation," directly contextualizing his virulent anti-immigrant campaign as racist blood-and-soil Nazism.

Trump's rhetoric was one of war; he vowed a fanatical crusade of, essentially, ethnic cleansing against the foreign-born blood-poisoners.

That's what's been playing out this year. The U.S. Constitution requires that those targeted by the government be given due process, and the government has established a large body of laws and system of adjudication for providing it but in an entirely cynical bid to create a pretext for getting around this, for activating, instead, extraordinary war powers, Trump arbitrarily designated several criminal gangs--Tren de Aragua was one of them--as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). But entirely lacking any political program--the central component of terrorism--they aren't. These gangs carry on regular criminal activity--peddling drugs, prostitution, theft, protection rackets, etc. Their violence is that of capitalists looking to make more and more money but operating outside the law. Moreover, the notion that TdA is a major threat within the U.S. is completely unsupportable, a politically-motivated phantom. The Department of Homeland Security recently estimated TdA's presence in the United States at only about 600 people. Admittedly, that comes with lots of caveats. The number is based on reassessments of Venezuelans who are known to have come to the U.S. and the U.S. and Venezuela don't share law-enforcement intel. At the same time, the 600 are people who may (or may not) have connections to TdA, not 600 members of TdA. A December Americas Quarterly article by a pair of academics, Charles Larratt-Smith and John Polga-Hecimovich, surveys the evidence and makes the case that claims about the danger allegedly posed by TdA are absurdly overblown, noting, among other things, that

"[N]early no claims made by U.S. law enforcement about crimes committed by purported members of TdA have been substantiated by hard evidence that directly connects the accused with the organization in Venezuela. In fact, none of the national, state, and local law enforcement agencies contacted in the U.S by InSight Crime in April 2024 reported any significant presence of TdA in their jurisdictions."

Despite a major diaspora of those fleeing economic collapse, political repression and growing violence in Venezuela--a truly horrific situation that has Venezuelans fleeing to their regional neighbors in droves--USA Today reports that "in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement told USA TODAY that agents had arrested fewer than 30 people with TdA connections."

On 15 March, Trump issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act against TdA, and later that same day, he ordered 261 people to be renditioned to El Salvador, where the "president," Nayib Bukele, has been busily making himself a president-for-life, those so shipped to be stored in CECOT, a prison notorious for human rights abuses and from which no one ever leaves alive. Of those, the Trump regime said 137 were TdA and removed under the "authority" of the Alien Enemies Act, 101 were removed as a result of regular immigration proceedings and 23 were said to be members of the MS-13 gang (also falsely designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the regime). As noted earlier, the renditions happened in direct violation of a court order.

When rolling out the regime's talking-points on all of this, Trump's ghouls cranked up the gaslight, trying to sell war and the image of the Maximal Leaders standing tall and protecting his people from the foreign sub-human, but what Trump had actually done kept getting in the way.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted that those who were renditioned--to slavery under an authoritarian regime (a move that raises a raft of other legal problems)--had been "foreign terrorist aliens." That's 3 separate claims in one phrase, and the Trump regime, which carried out all of this without so much as a trace of the due process required of it by the constitution, has neither proven nor even provided any evidence for any of them. The regime, which has insisted on keeping secret nearly every detail of this, provided no evidence that any of those renditioned were or had ever been part of the TdA or MS-13 gangs either. But calling them "terrorists," via that inaccurate designation from earlier, does play a lot better on the news than "the American dictator has declared people to be foreigners, members of Tren de Aragua and terrorists and renditioned them to a foreign tyranny without providing any evidence for any of that," doesn't it?

Asked about due process and how the regime was sure that those who were deported actually were who the regime claims they were, Leavitt said,

"I can assure the American people that Customs and Border Patrol and ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are sure about the identities of the individuals who were on these planes and the threat that they posed to our homeland. They take this incredibly seriously. They are putting their lives on the line to deport these designated terrorists from our country and they should be trusted to do that, and that's exactly what the American people elected this president to do... They should be trusted and respected by the American public with this operation."

The wisdom of history is that governments are never to be trusted in such matters but that's the word from the designated mouth of the most dishonest president in the history of the republic: Trust us."

Meanwhile, a growing body of credible information developed by the press when working the story directly contradicts such "assurances." From NBC News:

"The families strongly deny that their relatives are connected to the Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua, a claim the Trump administration has used to justify their quick deportations under a rarely used law from 1798, the Alien Enemies Act. They say their family members have been falsely accused and targeted because of their tattoos."

Among other things, the NBC report covers a man who was legally present in the U.S., had applied for asylum and was actively going through the asylum process--kidnapped by the Trump regime and shipped off to a foreign gulag, apparently because of, in a story that has appeared again and again throughout this sordid affair, innocuous body-art.

The Miami Herald:

"Families of three men who appear to have been deported and imprisoned in El Salvador told the Miami Herald that their relatives have no gang affiliation--and two said their relatives had never been charged with a crime in the U.S. or elsewhere. One has been previously accused by the U.S. government of ties to the Tren de Aragua gang, but his family denies any connection."

The New York Times:

"A growing chorus of families, elected officials and immigration lawyers have begun coming forward in the news media to reject or cast doubt on the allegations. Some lawyers--sent into frantic searches for their clients in detention centers across the country--believe their clients have been singled out simply for their tattoos... Lindsay Toczylowski, a lawyer with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said her client was a young professional in his 30s who worked in the arts industry and had been in detention since he sought entry into the United States last year, when he applied for asylum using an online government app, CBP One. She said her client had come under suspicion because of his tattoos, but his lawyers had not been given the opportunity to counter the claims through a court hearing."

WLRN Radio:

"The administration has not released the names of the deportees. But at least one migrant who appears to be among them also appears not to be a gang member, let alone an alien enemy terrorist--and appears to have been branded as such for nothing more than a tattoo."

The Miami Herald:

"Frengel Reyes Mota was supposed to be dealing with his ongoing asylum case as he fought for his chance to stay in the United States. Suddenly, he instead found himself locked up in a mega prison thousands of miles away... But the 24-year-old father does not have a criminal record in Venezuela. His U.S. immigration detention records are riddled with mistakes, raising questions about how reliable they are. He does not have tattoos and his family members deny he has any gang ties."

More generally, Colorado Public Radio reports:

"A CPR News review of court records, social media posts and immigration court proceedings finds that the evidence behind claims of gang membership is frequently little more than circumstantial, if that. Tattoos of roses and clocks. A nod at a telephone when a confidential informant asks about gang membership. Attendance at a party where an ICE claim about the presence of one member of Tren de Aragua is then extended to everyone in the room as an associate."

And so on. Leavitt repeatedly referred to those who were renditioned as "terrorists," called them "heinous monsters," said treating them this way was "saving countless American lives," but the regime was forced to concede in a court filing that "many" of those accused of being TdA "do not have criminal records in the United States" but, in an Orwellian twist, argued that "the lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat," and that, "In fact, based upon their association with TdA," an "association" for which the regime had offered no evidence whatsoever and that was one of the matters at issue,

"the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile."

Yowza. On 31 March, USA Today reported that

"Of the 50 people [so far] identified who have been deported to a prison in El Salvador, 44 have no criminal record in either the U.S. or Venezuela, according to Kate Wheatcroft, an immigrant rights activist with the New York-based nonprofit Together & Free."

Five who, before being renditioned, had sued over all of this, have no criminal record in either country and for several who had applied for asylum and were going through that process, "their asylum claims were based in part on having been targeted by TdA itself." The Miami Herald reported that one of the renditioned had already gone through the process and had been granted asylum in the U.S.! He--already a legally-protected asylee--was targeted and renditioned by the Trump gang because he had tattoos.[1]

The "source" for the claim that TdA uses identifying tattoos appears to be the corrupt, virulently anti-immigrant Greg Abbott regime in Texas. CNN reports that

"The Texas Department of Public Safety last year identified an assortment of tattoos connected to Tren de Aragua, many relatively common: stars on the shoulder, royal crowns, firearms, trains, dice, roses, tigers and jaguars. A photo collage of the tattoos even includes a Nike 'Jumpman' logo and Michael Jordan's number 23 jersey number as an identifier of gang membership."

Meanwhile, in the real world, Larratt-Smith and Polga-Hecimovich note that "the tattoos or dress codes ascribed to TdA members in the U.S. has little backing in other places where the gang has been known to operate." The Herald story notes that "experts have said that, unlike many other criminal gangs, TdA members don’t have specific, identifiable tattoos."

Perhaps most emblematic of the complete indifference of the Trump regime to who they were renditioning, eight of those shipped out were women. The Bukele regime refused to put them in a gulag designed for men--the foreign despot behaving, in this matter, more decently than the American one--and they were returned to the U.S. One of the women has since filed an affidavit in which she said, as Newsweek reported,

"Shortly after takeoff, she overheard two U.S. officials talking: 'There is an order saying we can't take off but we already have.'"

...establishing, if true, that officials were aware of the court order.[2] She also "says she witnessed federal agents urging men to confess gang membership under threat," trying to get them to sign papers saying they were Tren de Aragua.

In response to the court order barring the regime from carrying out the renditions, Leavitt offered what became the regime's standard response, attacking the constitutional order itself. She asserted that the court's actions "had no legal basis" and denied that "a single judge in a single city"--that is, the representative of a co-equal branch of government operating as it was legally constituted--can issue such orders.

"Moreover, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear, federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President's conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion."

...except, of course, this wasn't a matter of "foreign affairs," Trump has no "authorities under the Alien Enemies Act" and there is no "invasion," much less any "declared" one. The notion that Trump has these same powers--granted by congress in the Act only in the extreme circumstance of wartime--as part of his "core Article II powers" is a fallback "argument," one that essentially acknowledges that the invocation of the Act is, despite all the heat used to pitch it, frivolous and will only withstand scrutiny if the courts choose to completely ignore the law and its history. At the same time, the existence of the law renders ludicrous the "core Article II" assertion; if a president already had these extraordinary powers, there would be no need to either grant them to him or, as in the Act, limit their activation only to wartime; congress wouldn't even have the power to do the latter; that congress gave itself the power to activate the Act by declaring war means the powers the Act grants don't exist in the absence of the scheme established by the Act for activating them (and, in fact, all previous uses of the law--there have only been three in the entire scope of U.S. history--occurred during wars declared by congress). This secondary "argument" that Trump has these power as an inherent part of the presidency is, for obvious reasons, a particularly insidious one and, contradicting the first, it's being advanced with an eye toward giving the right-wing Supreme Court a pick-and-choose variety-menu of rationalizations for granting Trump these powers, something the regime hopes will happen.

White nationalist, demagogue and Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller says that's what they hope will happen. Apparently lost in a particularly thick haze, Miller called the judge's order, not his own boss's actions, an assault on democracy itself. Interviewed by Kasie Hunt on CNN, Miller asserted,

"The President of the United States and his administration reserve all rights under the constitution to conduct national security operations in defense of the United States. The Alien Enemies Act, which was passed into law by the founding generation of this country, men like John Adams, was written explicitly to give the president the authority to repel an alien invasion of the United States. That is not something that a district court judge has any authority whatsoever to interfere with, to enjoin, to restrict or to restrain in any way. You can read the law yourself. There's no one clause in that law that makes it subject to judicial review, let alone district court review."[emphases his]

Nor, of course, does there need to be; judicial interpretation has been a fundamental feature of the American system since its founding era--the same era that produced the Alien Enemies Act. Miller insisted Trump was exercising "his core Article II powers as commander-in-chief," but the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces; while Miller's comments are no doubt pleasing to those elements of Trump's base whose extremities stiffen at the thought of military force wielded in a holy mission against brown undermen, Trump's position in the military hierarchy is only relevant in a law-enforcement matter like this in that it's an example of the dictatorial "this is war" imagery Trump and his underlings are invoking. Miller insisted that "the president and the president alone makes the decision of what triggers" the Act--a claim belied by the plain text of the Act itself--and that his decision isn't subject to judicial review at all. Further, he rhetorically asked, "does a district-court judge have the right to direct or enjoin troop movements overseas?" A direct equation of Trump's control over domestic affairs in the U.S. to his control over the military. And, from a legal perspective, rancid rubbish. Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law points out that there was robust judicial review of presidential decisions made under the Act in all of the previous invocations of it--in the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.[3]

Miller also repeated the loony conspiracy theory outlined by Trump in his proclamation that Tren de Aragua--a gang made up of criminals imprisoned by the Venezuelan government--operated at the command of the Venezuelan government and that this justified Trump's invocation of the Act. "It is documented [in Trump's proclamation] that the TdA was sent by the Venezuelan government."

In reality, the U.S. intelligence community has, as the New York Times reports,

"concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela's government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders... Mr. Trump’s key factual assertions contradicted the earlier intelligence assessment, the officials [with which the Times spoke] said. It concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Maduro administration and that the two are instead hostile to each other, citing incidents in which Venezuelan security forces exchanged gunfire with gang members... The assessment, according to one official, also portrayed the gang as lacking the resources and being too disorganized--with little in the way of any centralized command-and-control--to be able to carry out any government orders... The assessment, this official also said, asserts that when the State Department designated the gang as a foreign terrorist organization last month at Mr. Trump’s direction, a minister in the Maduro administration publicly praised the action."

The Times story also notes that

Mr. Trump's proclamation cited scant evidence for his core finding that Tren de Aragua as an organization has been committing crimes to destabilize the United States 'at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.'

"Its most concrete detail was that the gang had expanded from 2012 to 2017, when Tareck El Aissami served as governor of the region of Aragua, and in 2017 Mr. Maduro appointed him as vice president. But the proclamation omitted that Mr. Aissami is no longer part of the Maduro administration, which is prosecuting him on corruption charges."

Another detail that may just be relevant here is the fact that the Maduro regime raided the prison TdA had taken over and turned into its headquarters for most of the gang's existence and razed it to the ground. Nearly 2 years ago.

Meanwhile, Trump's corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi[4] attacked the judge who issued the order,

"saying that he 'supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans.' She added that the DOJ would be 'undeterred' in its work with the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to 'stop this invasion.'"

Trump's "border czar" Tom Homan offered perhaps the most succinct summation of the administration's attitude, telling Fox viewers,

"I'm proud to be part of this administration. We're not stoppin'. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're comin'."

Trump was his usual reserved self:

No corruption scandals have ever touched James Boasberg, the judge in question, who was such a controversial, radical rabble-rouser that he'd gotten his first judicial appointment from a Republican (George Bush Jr.), his next (to his present post) by a Democrat (Obama)[5] and, even in this polarized political environment, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 96-0. While stonewalling Boasberg and flatly refusing to cooperate with the court, Trump has denounced those who have vandalized Tesla properties--a company owned by Elon Musk, Trump's head of the "Department of Government Efficiency"--as "sick terrorist thugs," Bondi condemned what she called a "wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties," and Trump suggested his regime would send the vandals (the "terrorists") to the same El Salvadoran prison. A small glimpse of where we're heading.

Trump's call for impeachment drew a rebuke from right-wing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who issued a statement:

"For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."

But MAGA-aligned congressclown Brandon Gill (R-TX) immediately introduced a resolution to impeach Boasberg. It laughably misstates both the facts and the law (Gill isn't a lawyer and isn't very bright either) and provides no grounds for any impeachment for its asserted high crimes and misdemeanors and instead of just being laughed out of the room, it immediately drew 22 co-sponsors. This is becoming a regular spectacle in congress: as the courts have widely resisted Trump's illegal actions, Republican congressclowns have tried to advance impeachment against multiple judges. House Speaker Mike Johnson characterized these courts' efforts to uphold the law, as they were constituted to do, as "abuses," introduced legislation to bar district courts from issuing such injunctions,and threatened to weaponize congress' power in the face of court actions he dislikes:

"we can eliminate an entire district court. We have power over funding, over the courts and all these other things. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act."

Trump won the election with over 50% of  voters casting their ballot against him--even if there even was such a thing as a mandate for the reactionary dictatorship he's trying to impose, this definitely ain't it--but as his numbers sink even further, Johnson fumed, "it violates separation of powers when a judge thinks that they can enjoin something that a president is doing, that the American people voted for"--a novel principle for Johnson who, like the other congressional Republicans, certainly never offered it when courts enjoined Joe Biden's actions. Trump and the rest of MAGA, in fact, praised and raved about the same kind of court-orders they now denounce as "tyrannical" when said orders were issued against the Biden administration.[6] Johnson's appeal to democracy is particularly rich--he, himself, worked to overturn the results of the 2020 election when the candidate he favored lost. That would be the candidate, now president, Johnson is backing here--the one who, himself, tried to overthrow that election and is also crowing out of his other beak about his allegedly great democratic mandate.

Documenting that kind of hypocrisy is easy but while it unquestionably illustrates the character of the players here and provides context, it's also trite, this writer finds it tiresome and it risks trivializing a matter that, just now, is of the absolute utmost importance. One can take the time to go through every part of this, as I have here, show how Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is baseless, how he's falsely said he can activate it at will and that it gives him legal superpowers it has never given any president and all the rest but the truth--one at which all this effort is getting--is that Trump doesn't care about the law. He doesn't care about the constitution. He's just a dictator doing dictatorial things and his citation of law is strictly frivolous--utilitarian window-dressing. If he thought he could mangle the annual presidential Thanksgiving Day proclamation into a legalistic pretext for and useful propaganda to sell what he wants to do here, he'd be using it. Just as before, it's the fascism, stupid.

This is gangster government, Americans. Do you really want to live under a state where what I've described here can happen? Where a president can just concoct a stream of lies then use them to assert tyrannical powers he doesn't have, ignore the law, ignore the constitution, violate both at will, declare people to be non-citizens at will, arbitrarily label them as criminals or terrorists or heinous monsters, kidnap them and rendition them to permanent slavery under a foreign despotism without having to prove or even provide any evidence of any of that, then insists that it's all beyond the scope of any legitimate review of any kind by the other duly-constituted formerly co-equal branches of government? A dictatorship where those other branches may even essentially commit suicide by agreeing to go along with and facilitate the dictator's murder of the constitutional order? Whatever you may think America's problems are, the most powerful nation in the history of the world being converted into this kind of dictatorship is a much bigger problem, a much bigger threat to you, me and to the entire world. This is not the way to anything better. But if things are allowed to be this way, they will become this way. That's the nature of this particular species of "government," each outrage against liberty becoming a precedent for further encroachment. Now, Americans, I don't, for a moment, believe that's what most of you want but that's what's upon us, and if you don't want it, you need to do something, before it's too late. Sound off, speak up, speak out while you still can. Because if this continues down the path it has, the days when you'll still be able will be numbered.

--j.

---

[1] That same Herald article covered the story of a professional soccer player who

"took part in peaceful demonstrations against the Nicolas Maduro regime [in Venezuela] in 2024. He was detained, tortured with electric shock shock and suffocation. When he was released he fled to the U.S. seeking protection."

" Despite having no criminal record in Venezuela, no links to gangs and no history of violence," he, too, was kidnapped by the Trump gang and sent to El Salvador.

[2] The Trump gang have denied they violated the court order, claiming the order came too late, when the planes had already departed. The judge had ordered any planes that had taken off to return first verbally then as part of a written order. Trump's underlings have been playing a game in public of insisting the planes were already gone before the written order was issued, and Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested the verbal order didn't have the same legal authority of a written one--strictly Uranian. The regime retained custody of those being renditioned

[3] Vladeck also points out that Trump's "argument" for invoking the Act, "is nonsense."

"Whatever else might be said about TdA, it is not a 'foreign nation or government,' and there is no 'foreign nation or government' that is currently undertaking an 'invasion or predatory incursion' against the United States. DOJ tries to split the difference by suggesting that TdA is acting at the direction of the 'Maduro regime,' but it never actually makes the argument that would have to follow to make the statute even arguably applicable--that the Venezuelan government is responsible for the 'invasion or predatory incursion.' The Alien Enemy Act is specific on this point, and TdA just doesn’t fit the bill."

[4] While Attorney General of Florida, Bondi faced complaints by Floridians defrauded by Trump as part of his "Trump University" scam. When running for reelection, Bondi solicited campaign contributions from Trump. He gave her a $25,000 "donation"--a bribe--then her office announced they'd be taking no legal action on those complaints. When Trump's original choice for Attorney General, an apparent sex-offender, blew up, he chose Bondi for the job.

[5] Boasberg is a federal judge, currently the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, not, as Trump told Fox, some "local judge."

[6] And to be clear, such injunctions are issued against every presidential administration. They all overstep at times--that's the nature of power. That Trump has drawn more of them than others reflects only his insistence on trying to run a gangster government and the judicial branch's resistance--so far--to this.

Trumptatorship 1: The Crisis

Earlier this month on Bluesky, MSNBC's Chris Hayes wrote this of Donald Trump:

Last year, in a bid to shield Trump from the legal consequences of his own criminal activity, his Supreme Court essentially ruled he is a king. And now that he's wormed his way back into power, he's behaving like one.

Pay attention here: We are, right now, barreling toward nothing less than the end of the American experiment in liberal democracy. That's what the current regime is trying to engineer, the enterprise it's trying to extirpate. If Trump succeeds, your constitution is gone, a dead letter. Your freedom, what you fancy are your inalienable rights, your ability to freely discuss things, to choose your own leaders, to have a say in how you're governed--all these things you idealize and for which you strive, what of them you already have and perhaps even take for granted--will either be gone or left a shadow resting on sand with a future measured in minutes. If your institutions have failed to alert you of this or instill in you sufficient alarm at the development, they have failed you quite badly.

Even while, turning on his firehose of falsehoods, Trump has sometimes rhetorically feigned an enthusiasm for "returning power to the states"--mouthing the quaint bromides of the old conservatism his own protofascism entirely supplanted years ago--Trump has, since assuming office in January, worked every day to centralize more and more power in his own hands, claiming then exercising dictatorial authority he does not have, insisting he can unilaterally override state and local laws by fiat and micromanage the U.S. from the Oval Office while also insisting his actions are beyond review by the other institutions of our government, conceding no checks or balances.

After a first term spent weaponizing the state against his enemies--and with Trump, they're always "enemies," no space for legitimate disagreement allowed--then four years spent whining about imagined weaponization against himself, he's adopted the pose that his "enemies" are, in fact, enemies of the state and is converting the federal government into a machine for persecuting them.

Nearly everything Trump has done so far is either completely illegal and/or blatantly unconstitutional. It would be difficult indeed to overstate this, and impossible for one article to cover all of it. The original point of this piece was to provide an overview of these activities but, as Trump has embraced a shock-and-awe approach that hits Americans with dozens of such outrages a day, it became quickly apparent that it was simply too large of a subject to even summarize in one but too important a one not to cover, so I've repurposed this as the first of--and sort of an introduction to--what will no doubt be many.

Exploiting the weaknesses of the American system, Trump has created a major constitutional crisis--not his first but by far his worst. The executive, who, under the constitution, is charged with enforcing the law and sworn to "preserve, protect and defend" the constitution, is, instead, not only refusing to enforce the law but is violating it on a daily basis as a matter of policy and asserting the power to nullify the constitution at will. Systemically, there's no higher authority with whom an appeal of any of this may be filed. There are two other theoretically co-equal branches of government but they rely on the executive to, in the case of congress, enforce their laws and in the case of the judiciary, enforce their rulings. If the executive refuses to do this or, worse, if those other branches become complicit in the executive's anticonstitutional power-grab--and it seems very likely that's going to be the case--all that remains is an entirely lawless concentration of power, operating wholly outside the bounds of the instrument--the constitution--that created and defined it. An autocratic regime. A dictatorship.

And throughout all of this, Trump and his minions have, without any trace of decency or propriety and as if trying to meet an assigned quota for asininity, demagoguery and toxicity, rhetorically attacked the constitutional order, both directly and indirectly, pouring the most savage hatred and derision upon it, working to undermine and destroy the public's belief in and support for it and convert any allegiance to it into hostility toward it.

All of this is aimed at replacing that order and the liberal democracy that underpins it with a repressive authoritarian state and status quo--at essentially repealing the American Revolution forever and erecting in its place a squalid autocracy where none of us would want to live, courtesy of a "president" for whom most voters didn't even vote.

What happens next? Far too big a question here but one to take up later. For now, it's enough to note that the same fundamental dysfunctionality of our institutions that gave rise to a Trump also makes coming back from him a very tough sell, in that returning to it makes for an also-unpalatable alternative. What people need is something better.

If Trump succeeds, what, if any, of our freedom that may survive him wouldn't survive for long, as the state he'd built would follow in the unwavering tradition of such regimes and seize on his established precedents to quickly end them. Trump is a reactionary visionary; fascism is the well from which he's drawing, with Orbán's Hungary as the immediate model, and while the sort of regime he's trying to impose is fundamentally contrary to America's basic character--that's why, among other things, he's so spectacularly unpopular--it seems a pipe-dream to think the dysfunctional system that empowered him is going to stop him. Part of the impetus for this series of articles, in fact, was the abysmal failure, so far, of most of the "free press"--that is, in this context, the corporate press--to treat this as a five-alarm fire in the house of liberal democracy. To the extent that the press serves, either intentionally or otherwise, to normalize Trump--and many outlets have completely capitulated to him--it's part of the problem. Meanwhile, the damage Trump can inflict and has already inflicted is incalculable. He has created the most serious internal crisis the U.S. has faced since the Civil War. He isn't yet a king but if he and his project aren't stopped, then drawing much of a distinction between a despotic king and what he's making of himself will become a strictly academic exercise.

[This is, as noted above, the 1st in what will be a series of articles, an introduction to what they'll cover in detail. Don't know how many there will be but unfortunately, it ain't lookin' like a short run.]

--j.

Dem Bones 2024: Autopsy of a Choice

Well, Donald Trump has been reelected and even for a committed anti-alarmist like myself, there's no way to sugarcoat the pill: It's a disastrous turn, for both the U.S. and the world, and the negative effects of it are likely to continue to impact everyone alive to read these words today for the rest of their lives.

As in the aftermath of any big loss, there are an infinity of assessments of What Happened, most refracted through the lens of the biases of those offering them, far too many long on wind but short on facts. Ritchie Torres, the dimwitted Clintonite congressclown that New York's 15th district has seen fit in inflict upon the rest of us, spoke for much of the online Clintonite-right faction in trying to somehow blame progressives:

Notably absent from the presidential ballot on Tuesday, of course, was anyone from "the far left," anyone running on "defund the police" or "from the river to the sea" or "Latinx" and anyone who either listens to anyone who pitches such things or who pitches any substantial genuine progressive reform. What American got was yet another lackluster Clintonite-right candidate, guided by all the same Clintonite-right advisers, bought off by all the same donors. Again. And this ticket lost to Trump. Again. By any reasonable assessment, it would seem as if Trump has a much greater friend than "the far left."

This writer's own analysis comes through the lens of his own biases as well, but as Torres' irrational raving indicates, not all such assessments are equal. Biases can be baggage. If they put some brand of blinders on the assessor or, as with Torres, some brand of hallucinogenic pharmaceutical in him, they aren't going to allow for a very good explanation for anything. But as with anything else, the soundness of competing analyses, however they're arrived at, is still always a question of whose argument is the most sound.

Many commentators think Trump's victory signals a hard shift, by Americans, to the far-right, toward Trump's ugly fascism, but that's arguably an even worse take than Torres'.

It's a fact that Trump is the ideal candidate of his hardest-core followers, the authoritarian strongman of which they've always dreamed. It's also a fact that they, alone, aren't even close to sufficiently numerous to elect him. A dynamic that is always at work in our elections but that few seem to recognize or acknowledge is that when, in a two-party system, it comes to expressing discontent with the party in power, the other party is the default. There's no other game in town. Trump benefited from simply having a failed incumbent of the other party in the White House, one with whom Americans have been exhausted for years.

Trump also sells his campaign via a firehose-of-falsehoods approach to propaganda, spewing many different, often blatantly contradictory, views on everything. I've often used this as an example:

"A 2016 Washington Post article offers an hilarious look at Trump’s many positions on the minimum wage in that campaign. In sequence, Trump opposed raising the federal minimum wage, said wages were already 'too high,' as if he supported reducing it, said he supports raising the min. wage to $15, said wages were 'too low,' supported raising the min. wage but not to $15, supported entirely abolishing the federal min. wage and supported raising the min. wage to $10/hour. In office, Trump made no effort to do any of these things. Take your pick."

The only through-line is Trump trying to get into power. Out of one side of his mouth, Trump is the "anti-war" candidate; out of the other, he persistently disdains diplomacy and international cooperation--the things that keep nations out of war--and advocates, as a solution to every international difficulty, belligerent authoritarian aggression. When it comes to expressing his absolute hatred of immigrants, no lie is black enough, no measure against them harsh enough, but then he'll say he's just opposed to illegal immigrants and that, in fact, the U.S. needs more immigrants--while, during his first term, radically restricting legal immigration, pledging more of the same in his next and promising to deport legal immigrants already in the U.S..

Trump even tries to appeal to progressive values broadly shared by most Americans while pushing darkest fascism that repudiates all of them. The Trump who, at his Madison Square Garden event on 27 Oct., was warm-and-fuzzily touting his Muslim support...

"[T]hese are people--by the way, they're great. They just want peace. They want to have peace, and it's great... [T]he Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion."

...is the same Trump who falsely claimed thousands of American Muslims celebrated in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11 when the World Trade Center fell, called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the U.S., actually enacted a version of that ban and has pledged, in the just-concluded campaign, to bring it back and strengthen it. He praised his Jewish support; he has repeatedly disparaged and condescended to Jews, suggesting, for example, in September that if he lost, Jews would be responsible, for voting for "the enemy." Trump has pledged to bar from the U.S. those who "don't like our religion." By"our religion," he wasn't talking Judaism or Islam.

Again, take your pick.

Trump has seamlessly integrated straightforwardly fascist themes with traditional conservative motifs and imagery, "Morning in America" fancies of tax cuts and a return of prosperity for those who stiffen in nostalgic appreciation for such corn porn, alongside a ruinous campaign of deportations against untermenschen, to heat the hemoglobin of the blood-and-soil brethren.

All of this contradictory and nonsensical messaging goes out there, being further distorted by the massive right-wing media apparatus that plagues the U.S.. People, who tend to have a lot more going on in their lives than following public affairs, get bits and pieces of it, form their notion of Trump--and, more broadly, their notion of what's happening in the U.S.--from what they pick up. Sometimes--ofttimes--they hear what they want to hear, remember what they want to remember. It's an exaggeration to say Trump doesn't even have policies, but it's dead-on accurate to say that, other than a few typically really bad and harmful ones, he's entirely unserious about policy. That's why he can use that firehose so effectively--he doesn't really care. What people who don't closely follow public affairs tend to get from him is a vibe, and the vibe he's projecting, when one strips away most of the specifics, is the one they're currently buying: discontent. People have been let down by the political Establishment--that's just a fact--and they feel it; Trump tells them they're right, and calls out The Elites of that Establishment, excoriates them, pokes fun at them. Even if, when it comes to that, his targets are the wrong ones, his attacks ludicrous, ill-informed, false, no other politician does that. And the political Establishment hates Trump, which allows him to pose as some sort of rebel and Wear Their Scorn As A Badge Of Honor. Trump's overawing lack of polish has always made him seem, on a public stage otherwise populated by blow-dried, scripted, rehearsed-down-to-the-micronometer politicians, Genuine--another quality appreciated by people perpetually bombarded by a never-ending parade of those kinds of political robots. All of this is a style, a brand, and though any reasonable, informed analyst would dismiss Trump as something like the least ethical used car salesman they'd ever encountered, it's received by many as an indication that Trump is a strong, straight-talking, hard-assed leader, something else people appreciate.[1]

On the other side, of course, are the Democrats, and the scorn that party's corrupt Clintonite-right leadership has earned by this disaster is very difficult indeed to adequately express. It isn't inaccurate to say that Trump has never won the presidency but, rather, that Democrats have lost it.

That's what happened in 2016. Hillary Clinton, an historically bad and historically disliked candidate, worked with the Dem elite to game the Democratic primary system, tilting the process in her favor and against her surging progressive rival Bernie Sanders. Clinton had already proven herself a weak, loser candidate, but the party poobahs lined up behind her, crushed the energizing hope-and-change candidate challenging her and taught an entire generation of Democrats that their own party's "leaders" thought beating them and their candidate was more important than beating Republicans (all the data on the race showed Sanders was a much stronger general-election contender than Clinton, decimating Trump while Clinton barely squeaked by). Then, as many observers (like this writer) had predicted, Clinton lost to Trump, a rival she and her team had themselves handpicked and worked to promote. Something that will loom large in the coming years is that, had Sanders been the 2016 Democratic nominee, Trump would probably now be an increasingly distant memory. Dem elites made bad, unspeakably stupid decisions at every turn and have been indispensable to Trump's rise. America has paid--and will continue to pay--a terrible price.

The public doesn't like rule by the donor-driven conservative "Democrats" of the Clintonite right but a dysfunctional system has ensured the faction has held hegemony over the party apparatus and its federal elected officials for decades, even as the public has moved further left. Joe Biden was a conservative "Democrat" of a bygone era and had been showing signs of significant cognitive impairment since he'd entered the 2020 presidential race but the party Establishment backed him because after all their other potential champions fell, they needed a name-brand Clintonite to defeat Bernie Sanders, in his 2nd presidential bid. During that campaign, Biden told his wealthy donors that "nothing will fundamentally change" under his rule and in office, that usually seemed to be his guiding principle. His presidency was a miserable failure (Trump was, in fact, only able to present himself as a viable presidential candidate after J6 because of Biden's refusal to act against he and his goons in an appropriate and timely manner).[2] His approval rating went permanently underwater--more disliked than liked--in Aug. 2021, only 7 months into his regime, and it hit permanent majority disapproval only 2 months later.

Yet still, the party poobahs stuck with him. An ABC News report on the 2023 Democratic National Committee's winter meeting in Philadelphia spotlighted how out-of-touch they'd become. It was headlined "Democrats Rally Without 'Any Reservations' Around Biden's Expected 2024 Campaign." The money-quote:

"'I have heard from no one within the DNC or other power brokers within the Democratic Party any reservation about Joe Biden,' one of the DNC members said."

...while that same week, the ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 58% of rank-and-file Dems "support the idea of nominating someone other than Biden... Just 31% said they would support Biden... Sixty-two percent of Americans say they would be 'dissatisfied' or 'angry' if Biden were reelected"; 62% of respondents thought Biden has accomplished little or nothing. While party officialdom was unanimously full-steam-ahead on a reelection effort by this doomed, brain-waxed incumbent, supermajorities of Democrats had, since at least July 2022 (when I first began tracking the phenomenon), been saying they didn't want Biden to run again and didn't want the party to renominate him. The rest of the public was even less warm to the idea; by the time Biden left the race in July, he'd been losing to Trump in the head-to-head polling averages for over 10 months, in an unbroken line, losing every swing state for 7 (and losing most of them since the previous Fall).

Biden's delusional insistence on running for reelection, backed by the party elite (many of whom were, for years, complicit in trying to conceal his cognitive impairment from the public), robbed Democrats of what would have been, in the absence of this, a vibrant primary that would have allowed Dem voters--whether they would have availed themselves of the opportunity or not--to pick a strong contender from a broad selection of candidates. Had Biden remained in the race, Trump would have defeated him on 5 Nov. in a major landslide that would have been accompanied by major Dem losses all over the U.S.. But as it was, Biden wasted over a year of everyone's time, then dramatically self-destructed in a prime-time debate with Trump.

Only then, when forced into it, did the party hierarchy begin to turn against him. When Biden was forced out of the race by their newfound no-confidence, he threw his weight behind Kamala Harris. Though someone not connected to the Biden administration would have had a better chance, Biden had already screwed that pooch on that; there was little time to introduce a whole new face. More importantly, no one else would have been able to access the illicit campaign money Biden had collected to date. So Harris, who wouldn't have won a competitive primary battle for the nomination, was thrown into the deep end of a campaign for President of the United States at, in effect, the very last minute. It would be an unenviable position for a gifted politician, and Harris would never be mistaken for one of that caliber.

Still, she started with some positive progressive populist messaging that put her numbers, which were rather awful, in ascent. She proposed removing medical debt from Americans' credit scores. She scorched corporate greed and pledged to back a federal ban on price-gouging on food (inflation and sustained, insanely elevated prices on everything was a huge issue, that could have--and should have--been been hit at every turn). She endorsed revoking tax incentives that rewarded private equity for buying up large numbers of homes (such investors exploiting the housing market is a major factor in making home ownership increasingly unattainable for Americans), and called for a legal crackdown on rent-setting software that allows for price-fixing by corporate landlords. She swiped Trump's proposal to end taxes on tips for service workers, putting a more sane face to a solid idea otherwise advanced by a candidate who was entirely unserious about it. It was a really small policy though, and all of these proposals are really just tinkering, not the big, structural reforms that are needed, but for a hastily-assembled campaign, they were a good start. In the one good major decision of her campaign, she picked plainspoken Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running-mate. Walz, in turn, did something so unusual these days that it seemed revolutionary: he pointed out that Republicans are the aggressors in the sorts of culture-war "issues" on which they prefer to dwell, characterized their authoritarian obsession with getting the state into everyone else's private affairs as "creepy" and "weird" and greeted it with exhortations to "Mind your own damn business." Basic, obvious and utterly effective progressive messaging that Dem politicians at that level haven't used in ages.[3]

This pulled her out of the hole in which she'd been as a consequence of her association with Biden and put her ahead in the presidential race.

Then, instead of building on it, came what many are calling The Pivot.

I'm not really fond of that characterization. It's describing, broadly, Harris' move to the right, and it's an accurate representation of how What Happened was widely received but the reality is that Harris was already a conservative opportunist. Calling it The Pivot puts her on the wrong starting-blocks and implies there was a dramatic, Suddenly It Happened sort of change, when that wasn't really the case. The mildly populist messaging that made her a contender was just that--"mildly"--and had, from the start, always been muddled with a certain degree of Clintonite muck.[4] But as big money from the donor class began to fill Harris' coffers, the populist talk quickly faded and all but disappeared, the muck consuming nearly everything. I'll stick with calling it The Pivot, but I'll leave it in caps like that and note it's a very problematic characterization.

Arguably, The Pivot can be said to have started with a series of stories in which the Harris campaign was quietly but systematically walking back support for nearly every progressive position the candidate had made a show of taking in the past. She no longer supported a ban on fracking. She--again--no longer supported Medicare For All. She wouldn't support expanding the Supreme Court. She no longer supported a federal jobs guarantee. In her 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she had advocated making border-crossing a civil infraction, rather than a criminal offense, bringing it in line with the rest of current law (where being present in the U.S. without authorization is a civil infraction); she ditched that too. Would she support student debt relief? Well...

"Her platform briefly mentions it, saying that she will continue 'working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt' but without outlining a specific plan."

On the campaign trail, Harris never so much as mentioned the issue, much less any plan, not even at her debate with Trump, when Trump attacked Joe Biden on it.

This was Kamala the conservative opportunist. She'd frequently cosplayed as a progressive earlier in her political career because she thought it would benefit her, but she'd proven herself willing to jettison all of it on a dime and move right--to, for example, become Biden's running mate--whenever she thought doing so would benefit her. That sort of thing is demoralizing and, having seen the same con many times, exhausting to politically-engaged progressives, appalling to those who want and maybe desperately need progressive reforms and are being left behind by such shifts and breeds distrust, uncertainty and disapprobation across the entire political spectrum. No one--or, at least, no one who doesn't see politics as a sporting event and just mindlessly cheers on their team--likes a flip-flopper.

The Pivot continued.

Harris used her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Committee--one of her highest-profile moments of the campaign--to announce she would revive the atrocious "bipartisan" border bill that had mercifully died in congress back in February. When that bill was being hashed out, Democratic legislators had simply given up on trying to get anything positive into it, abandoning even the Dreamers, and, in the name of "bipartisanship," just gave Republicans everything they wanted--a bloated, punitive, miserable atrocity of a bill--only to see Donald Trump order it killed anyway so that he could run on the immigration "issue." Harris said she would pass it through congress and sign it into law. This included, among other things, resuming construction of Trump's border wall, a project Harris had, in 2018, denounced as "unAmerican" and that Biden had abandoned. In a campaign in which Trump's hate-filled tirades involved insisting immigrants were a pet-eating, blood-poisoning, subhuman infestation carrying out a violent crime-wave against white Americans, Harris' representation of herself as a border-hawk, even a kinder, gentler one, only bolstered Trump's narrative.

Under Biden, the U.S. had become not just the largest producer of fossil fuels in the world but in the history of the world, with all the negative consequences that entails for the present and the future; Harris, who, in another lifetime, had been a supporter of the Green New Deal, announced she would be supporting even greater domestic fossil fuel production, bragged about Biden's "accomplishments" in this area.

In the 2020 campaign, Harris had proposed taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income. In his last budget proposal, Joe Biden proposed just that--taxing long-term capital gains for households with an annual income of $1 million or more at a 39.6% rate. Even this proved to be too much for candidate Harris, who again moved to the right of even her conservative boss by proposing only a 28% rate.

As a senator, Harris had supported marijuana legalization, which most Americans had, by then, supported for 9 years. In 2020, Biden's people had consented to the inclusion of a weaker decriminalization plank in the Democratic platform (itself a step back from the previous Dem platform, which had called for creating "a reasoned pathway for future legalization"). In the 2024 platform, Harris backed away from even that, offering only that "no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana" and promoting other reforms. Then, in a bizarre twist, Harris, in the last few days of the campaign, suddenly flipped again and endorsed full marijuana legalization at the federal level.

Biden had been bleeding support since last Fall for his unwavering, unconditional backing of the ongoing campaign of mass murder in Gaza by the Netanyahu regime in Israel, which was trying, for months, to draw the U.S. into a larger regional war while Netanyahu was all but openly backing Trump. When Harris became the nominee, it was hoped that she would go in a different direction but in August, her campaign flatly stated she wouldn't support an arm embargo, the only thing likely to put a stop to the killing. When, at a campaign event, Harris faced protesters chanting "we won't vote for genocide," she was condescending: "You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I'm speaking." At a CNN townhall event on 23 Oct., Harris was asked what she would say to those who are thinking about voting for a 3rd party candidate or sitting out the presidential election because of this issue, her answer was just ghastly: she suggested that those who care about this issue should vote for her anyway because they also care about "the price of groceries" and abortion rights.

At his debate with Harris, Trump made use of all of this, saying

"Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window. She's going to my philosophy now. In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat. She's gone to my philosophy."

...before, of course, turning on his firehose again to add that she was a "Marxist" and that, if she was elected, she'd change back.

Harris had to bear the baggage of a widely despised incumbent Clintonite-right administration of which she had been a part from the beginning and was stuck with trying to present herself as a change candidate--because absolutely no one was interested in continuing Biden's rule--while, at the same time, not being terribly critical of Biden, due to the mechanics of the Democratic party and her place in the administration. Politically, she needed to find a way to at least seem as if she was dramatically separating herself from Biden but she never did. The contradiction came to a head when, appearing on ABC's THE VIEW less than a month before the election, Harris was asked what, during the last four years, she would have done differently as president than Joe Biden. It was an obvious question, something for which any remotely skilled politician would have been prepared. Harris wasn't.

"There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of--and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact--the work that we have done."

...and that's probably how she really feels but if Harris had been actively trying to commit political suicide, the only more effective way to do it would have been to advocate something like legalized pedophilia. Trump and the Republicans, who had already been spending a fortune on ads tying Harris to Biden,[5] seized on these profoundly brainless remarks and plastered them all over her right up until the election.

That same interview also showcased what was probably the most ruinous aspect of The Pivot, Harris deciding to spend much of the latter portion of her campaign (particularly the last month or so) alienating her own party's base to focus on chasing that cherished Clintonite chimera, the "moderate Republican" (often expressed these days as the "anti-Trump Republican"), that mythical mass of conservative voters out there somewhere who, if they could be magically mobilized, would allow corrupt donor-driven "Democrats" to ignore/replace even more of their party's progressive base and be even more pro-plutocrat with impunity. It was one of Hillary Clinton's many blunders in 2016 and as if that election--and it's results--had never happened, Harris fell right into it:

The only thing Harris told THE VIEWers she would do that was "different" from Biden was "I plan on having a Republican in my cabinet." A few days later, she said that, if elected,

"Not only will I have a Republican in my Cabinet, but I'm also going to... [create] a bipartisan council of advisers who can then give feedback on policy as we go forward... We need a healthy two-party system, we have to have a healthy two-party system, we have to. It's in the best interest of all of us."

How something like that could help produce "a healthy two-party system" or even if it could, why producing "a healthy two-party system" is the job of a presidential candidate of one party who is supposed to be running against the other party, rather than helping empower it, is anyone's guess.

Not so much a mystery--though Harris was entirely oblivious to it--was the harm Harris was regularly doing to herself with this sort of nonsense. In the home stretch, the earlier positive pitches of progressive reform were mostly gone.[6] There were no bold proposals. Harris, charging to the right, was down to vaguely hinting at a pro-business vision of her presidency for which no one poorer than a millionaire was interested in dropping a tab, mouthing reductionist and inadequate "Orange Man Bad" messaging re:Trump, parading around celebrity supporters and, most especially, drawing, then, with no sense of self-awareness, waving around endorsements by highly partisan Republicans, whose backing only confirmed she was conservative enough not to alienate their support. Many of those same Republicans had, in fact, already endorsed Joe Biden before he withdrew. She was running on "defending democracy," which her own party had tried to undermine for years,[7] while refusing to practice it--refusing to offer a positive vision for a better future around which voters could rally. Even if Harris hadn't directly said, on nationwide television, that she wouldn't do anything different from Biden, this just sounded--overwhelmingly and depressingly sounded--like more of the same.

On 18 Oct., the New York Times reported about how Harris

"has carefully courted business leaders, organizing a steady stream of meetings and calls in which corporate executives and donors offer their thoughts on tax policy, financial regulation and other issues."

That would be the representatives of the same business class that Harris, during her early moments of populist posturing, was publicly pummeling. Behind the scenes--while she was pounding Trump for being a puppet of such creatures--they were the ones shaping her policies. Soon, little pretense remained; Harris was openly touting endorsements of her candidacy by scores of "business leaders" and adopting billionaire Mark Cuban as one of her most visible campaign surrogates.

Democrats wouldn't allow a pro-Palestinian speaker to address the party convention about "the impact of Israel's military operation in Gaza," but they couldn't seem to award enough speaking slots to Republicans. Harris received and raved about endorsements by over 100 former Republican national security officials, then over 250 former staffers of the Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr. administrations and the campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. She drew endorsements from Alberto Gonzalez, the civil-liberties-slaying former Attorney General for George Bush Jr., and gore-spattered war-criminal Dick Cheney, Bush's Vice President. In North Carolina, Harris "used rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro to tout endorsements from Republicans who have crossed the aisle to back her." Harris repeatedly campaigned with Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, former congressclown and a vile reactionary demagogue despised by progressives but that the Clintonite right had bizarrely tried to turn into a hero for her opposition to Trump. They appeared together in, among other places, Ripon, Wisconsin, because it was the birthplace of the Republican party, and the crowd cheered at the mention of Dick Cheney and Trump VP Mike Pence! The New York Times reported that in Oct., Harris stumped with Cheney "more than any other ally." Harris sent Ritchie Torres and Bill Clinton's corpse to Michigan, home of the largest Arab and Muslim community in the U.S. and a state she was in danger of losing because of Israeli mass-murder in Gaza. Torres, our old pal from the beginning of this article who tried to blame "the far left" for Harris' loss, talked up Harris' support of Israel and, among other things,

"emphasized that Harris’s team had rejected calls by Michigan-based organizers of the “Uncommitted” protest movement to host a Palestinian-American speaker at the Democratic National Convention. Harris made the controversial move, Torres reportedly said, because she didn’t want to risk the chance of any speaker opposing Israel."[8]

Clintoncorpse, meanwhile, asserted that Hamas "forces" the IDF to kill civilians and dismissed, as misguided, criticism of the Israelis' grotesquely disproportionate violence.[9] Harris went on to lose Michigan. Three days before the election, Harris dispatched Hillary Clinton to stump for her campaign in Florida to, in the words of one local news outlet, "energize voters in hopes of turning Florida blue." Hillary Clinton has, for most of the last 7 years, been more disliked by Americans than Donald Trump and lost Florida in 2016, after Barack Obama had won it twice.[10] Harris went on to lose Florida--a swing state--by over 13 points.

Throughout these final weeks, the song remained the same.

It didn't help matters when, only 6 days before the election, Biden, in his typically addle-brained fashion, seemed to call Trump supporters "garbage." Biden was reacting to MAGA "comedian" Tony Hinchcliffe, who, at a Trump rally a few days earlier, referred to Puerto Rico as "literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean." Biden retorted, "the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters." In context, Biden was clearly referring to Hinchcliffe's words (think "supporter's"), but Trump and the Republicans pounced on it, and even if they were being somewhat dishonest, they were right to do so. Biden can't communicate; he needed to shut the fuck up and stay out of the race. His mind-melter turned what should have been a scandal that hurt Trump--one of Trump's multiple racist speakers--into one that hurt Harris--the sitting president of her party pulling a "basket of deplorables."

In the election aftermath, Rolling Stone has reported that many Democratic operatives and insiders made the case that "palling around" with the Cheneys "and making the campaign's closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris" were bad ideas, that they would alienate and dissuade Dem voters "and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states." They were told to go piss up a rope. So add that to the pile.

A fat lot of things went into Trump's win and that kind of "leadership" in the Democratic party may be the porkiest of the passel. One could just look at Joe Biden's spectacular unpopularity, say Harris just wasn't able to separate herself from him and overcome it and leave it at that--people voted for what they saw as the only alternative--but the bad decisions by the Democratic leadership that cursed us with this outcome (and as much as I've written here, I've barely scratched the surface on this) are just too many, too egregious, too self-evidently stupid and went on too long to sweep under the rug. Votes are still being counted but so far, it looks like it came down to Trump energizing his party's base while Harris' move-ever-rightward antics (among other things) demobilized hers. The Dems just failed to turn out a lot of their voters. This was a winnable election, and Trump didn't win it; Democrats lost it. Again.

As for Trump himself, he draws votes for reasons that tend to be a lot more complicated than some allow (or perhaps want to allow). It's laughable to suggest that, because they voted for him, Americans are moving sharply right or support the sort of end to liberal democracy he pushes or have embraced the fascism he represents. The issues polling to which Americans are subjected laugh that out of the room. If that isn't good enough, then consider that all across the U.S., the very same bodies of voters who backed Trump, often overwhelmingly, also supported progressive ballot initiatives (or opposed MAGA-backed ones) by lopsided margins. If, once Trump launches his 2nd presidency, he undertakes the many odious proposals he promised, he'll find precious little public support for any of it, and overwhelming opposition to most.

After screwing over all of us again, the Clintonites who run the Democratic party have, in their election post-mortems, largely retreated into their usual deflectionary bullshit. The loss, they say, is down to sexism. Or racism. Or--most especially--progressives. Somehow. They'll insist Americans have moved hard-right, so Dems should do the same (which is what they always want the Dems to do, no matter what happens). The most contemptibly elitist of them have attacked the voters. It's the fault of absolutely everything and anything, except for them--the people who actually ran the campaign, made all the decisions and failed. Again. The people who, on behalf of a parasitic donor class, feed the rise of fascism by choking off all systemic avenues for the progressive reform that would choke it off. The facts: For the 3rd time, Democrats struggled against a candidate who is still nothing more than a reality-show clown hated by most of the public and that any real opponent would have ground up for bait. For the 2nd time, they lost to him. They barely defeated him in 2020 and would have almost certainly lost to him then as well, if not for covid. But any relatively solid contender would roll right over Trump. Going with bad Clintonite-right leaders who consistently make stupid decisions and pull these razor-thin margins, instead of good ones who would send the Trumps of the world into permanent retirement, is a choice. Dems can make a different one. If there are any more elections.

--j.

---

 [1] In a pretty good post-election article, Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs writes that Trump "is one of the most skilled bullshitters of our age. He has an amazing capacity to convince voters that things that objectively harm them (such as letting climate change spin out of control, or not raising their wages) are actually measures to stick it to The Elites."

 [2] Biden--and his conservatism--was only part of a much larger systemic failure with regard to Trump. Both of Trump's impeachments should have resulted in his being removed from office. Trump violated both emoluments clauses of the constitution every day he was in office, to no consequence (except his own corrupt enrichment). The manycrimes he committed and that would have sent anyone else to prison are legion and he's never been properly held accountable for any of them. And so on. Bu it was Biden who was charged with the federal response to all of this, and it was he who dropped the ball.

 [3] There's no question Walz was a major asset to the ticket, when the campaign would let him be, but he may have been a mixed blessing, as, hearing him speak, especially after he first joined the race, one couldn't help but wonder why he wasn't the presidential candidate. Someone in the Harris campaign may have recognized this; they eventually seemed to muzzle that kind of messaging.

 [4] At a North Carolina rally (16 Aug.), when she wast still pitching the more populist policies, she also said things like this:

"Together, we will build what I call an opportunity economy, an opportunity economy, an economy where everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed. Everyone, regardless of who they are or where they start, has an opportunity to build wealth for themselves and their children. And where we remove the barriers to opportunity, so anyone who wants to start a business or advance their career can access the tools and the resources that are necessary to do so. I will focus on cutting needless bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory red tape and encouraging innovative technologies while protecting consumers and creating a stable business environment with consistent and transparent rules of the road. As President, I will bring together labor with small businesses and major companies to invest in America, to create good jobs, achieve broad-based growth, and ensure that America continues to define the future and lead the world."

...sentiment aimed firmly at the business class Harris hoped--correctly--would fund her campaign and that, like so much Clintonite-right messaging, could have been offered by any conservative Republican without changing a word.

 [5] In 2023, when the Biden campaign's view was that the economy was doing great and Biden's numbers were only bad because people were too stupid to recognize it, Harris had declared "Bidenomics is working!" And touted Biden's allegedly stellar economic performance, while Americans were struggling to pay for groceries. Trump and the Republicans turned these clips into ads and ran them to ribbons:

"The Trump campaign and its allies have spent more than $38 million replaying that soundbite almost 70,000 times in campaign advertisements since Harris became the Democratic nominee, looking to capitalize on persistent voter concerns about the economy and blunt Harris' turn-the-page messaging by yoking her to President Joe Biden’s record."

The Trump campaign had been running these ads long before Harris appeared on THE VIEW, which makes Harris' complete lack of preparation for such a question even more dumbfounding.

 [6] There were two bizarre exceptions that, collectively, seem to have been an effort at a Hail Mary pass by the failing campaign. First, Harris randomly decided, with less than 2 weeks before the election, to endorse increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour, a signature progressive issue (thanks to Bernie Sanders). Why wasn't this wildly popular proposal a part of her pitch from the beginning? Chalk it up to another stupid decision. Second, as noted above, she suddenly decided to support marijuana legalization, which has had 70% or higher public support for years now but which Harris had rejected only 2 months earlier, backing language on the subject in the party platform that was even more conservative than Biden had in 2020.

 [7] And, in fact, even as Harris was running, the dimwitted corporate lobbyist Biden made chairman of the DNC released an ad attacking Green party candidate Jill Stein, claiming "a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump," showing Stein morphing into Trump, attacking those who have voted for Stein, endorsing the Clinton cult's lie that Stein is why Trump won in 2016, even touting one of Trump's own lies and offering viewers the Orwellian spectacle of Dems officially complaining about Trump allies "boosting" Stein's campaign in an ad spotlighting Stein's campaign. The DNC had never run an ad against a 3rd-party candidate, and the complaint wasn't a policy dispute but an attack on an alternative party for even existing--an attack on liberal democracy itself.

 [8] Facing pushback, Torres tried to justify this (and just made it worse):

"'All people of all backgrounds should be welcome at the DNC but not all messages should be given a microphone on the Democratic Party's most important stage,' Torres told JTA. 'A pro-Israel party like the Democratic Party has every right to filter out anti-Israel messaging, just like a pro-choice party has every right to filter out anti-choice messaging.' He added that he believes Harris 'falls squarely within the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus that has historically governed American politics.'"

It's "the far left," Ritchie!

 [9] Harris had earlier given Bill Clintoncorpse a primo speaking slot at this year's Democratic convention.

[10] No wise campaign would touch the politically radioactive Hillary Clinton with a 10-foot pole; before sending her to Florida, Harris gave her a top speaking slot at this year's Democratic convention. Meanwhile, while Harris was using her as a campaign surrogate, Clinton was running around saying things like Americans should be prosecuted for circulating Russian-backed pro-Trump "propaganda" and arguing for repealing Section 230 of federal communications law, the very foundation of free speech on the internet, which Trump himself tried, for years, to repeal.