i think you're absolutely right. while we are in very very dangerous territory, the continued overplaying of their hand will backfire spectacularly. notice how everyone is now talking about freespeech and suddenly ck is last weeks news(finally) .
He’s not last week’s news, they’re gearing up to turn him into a full blown martyr and the reincarnation of MLK Jr.
Not to mention. memorial service fitting for a head of state or king. To passing a law in Congress making a Charlie Kirk Day and annual event like 9/11, as well as all of the other honors like the Presidential medal of Freedom.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the next honor he receives is a statue in the Capitol. And as a result, they’ll pass a bill limiting our ability to use words like fascist as an excuse to bring down the rhetoric and bring this nation closer together. It’s all a ruse; end of story!
Maybe. I think the White House is just having a psychotic break, unable to process the breakdown from their own hands. They have spent so much time gaslighting everyone in sight that they've completely lost the thread of public reality. If friggin' Ted Cruz can say what he said, we're in Bizzaro World. If Disney bounces back, it's curtains.
Right now they don't have to worry about opposition. Congress is largely controlled, and the President can just veto anything that might get through that body anyway to try to constrain him. The courts are captured. Any protest or resistance--peaceful or not--to the regime's next moves will be spun, by an increasingly captured media, as more evidence of the "violent left" and "antifa terrorists". Elections aren't for another year, giving time for states to further crack down on the ability to vote, with the courts signing off on all of it at the top.
It's depressing to think that the only realistic way out of this spiral for my southern neighbours would be a military coup, and after that you have a shadow of a democracy at best.
I had this exact thought earlier today, and I was asking myself if a military coup is the only way out of this. With the consolidation of media entities (including this one) into the hands of a few that have supported and have been enabled and enriched by the regime, all dissent will be squelched. As haphazard as this fascist clampdown may seem. It appears to have been a frightening success so far.
“Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner publicly slammed current CEO Bob Iger over Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, asking “Where has all the leadership gone?” and criticizing the “out-of-control intimidation” following FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s threats to Disney.”
While I agree, MAGA has jumped the shark, we may be too late to reverse course. MAGA has consolidated power and is essentially unchecked; they control every lever of power.
And this Kirk fiasco was the last straw. Ironically, Eisner was CEO at Disney we he cancelled Bill Mahar’s show Politically Incorrect (24 years ago), only to be replaced by Jimmy Kimmel; Mahar made a tasteless joke about the suicide bombers after 9/11 (pressure from Bush Whitehouse).
And now we have Eisner criticizing Iger, and Mahar siding with the fascists and thinking Kimmel was wrong for saying that republicans were doing their damndest to lay blame at the democrats feet; which they did. We’ve gone full circle!
This is reminiscent of Horst Wessel who became a propaganda symbol in Nazi Germany following his murder in 1930 by two members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Now we have Kirk, and god forbid we speak poorly of either man.
WTF just happened?????? As Mark Twain famously said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but if often rhymes!
Bottom line: We have been slowly descending into fascism since Trump took office. It reminds me of the story of the rich man who lost all his wealth. When asked how he lost all his money he replied, “gradually, then all at once!”
That’s not what I am talking g about. He also stated that Jimmy was wrong, when he didn’t get it wrong. Mahar tried to have it both ways. That’s my point!
One of the most dangerous things for anyone in any position of power is to silence or ignore critics. Such self-defeating moves block valuable information about one’s own vulnerabilities and blindspots, not to mention opportunities to benefit from useful ideas and expand support. Listening does not imply agreement. It does imply mature strength.
The miscalculation was that “normie America” knew and cared as much about Charlie Kirk as they did, saw the responses to his death as they did, and saw the proper course of action as total war on “the left”.
The reality is that “normie America” didn’t know much about Kirk, thinks murder is bad, and wants to lower the temperature, not raise it. They also know that the Troll in Chief is part of the problem.
Sending online mobs after baristas and Office Depot clerks and cheering their firing is not going to go well. Nor is using the power of government to go after comedians. Everything they have done since Kirk’s death is an overreaction.
Who ever thought I would feel hopeful from something Ted Cruz said? I think it’s too early to know which way things will go. But another hopeful sign to me was red Ohio State Legislature putting out a bi-partisan statement condemning political violence and naming both Kirk and the Hortmans. If red Ohio wants to signal publicly bi-partisan cooperation, it is a public rejection of the twisted rhetoric coming from the White House. I do think trump’s state of malignant narcissism is driving the overreach we are seeing. He could have quietly continued implementing government takeover, but instead he is basically screaming “I am your Emperor, Goddammit! Look at my beautiful ballroom!”
Can anyone explain why even the 'royal family' is sucking up to him? They all know what frauds the tRUMPS are! Seems like the only people not intimidated by this shit show are people not motivated by money. It was bad enough he disrespected Queen Elizabeth...Charles said...my turn! And of course the classless tRUMPs delivered...'people are saying'...
The UK’s problem is our dire (post Brexit) economy. We simply cannot afford any collateral damage from Trump if we are to avoid electing our very own Trump acolyte.
King Charles is being deployed to try to minimise disruption while we pray for MAGA to crash and burn as soon as possible.
The UK really wants a favourable trade deal with the US. Trump admires the UK Royal Family (he wants his family to be the US equivalent; see also Mark Carney referencing only two specific locations as not being for sale when he met with Trump, those being the White House and Buckingham Palace) and they know it, so buttering him up like that is a political decision. The monarch largely acts on the advice of the government of the day.
This came up some months ago when Charles, as King of Canada, read the Speech from the Throne to open Parliament here back in May. (The speech itself was nothing remarkable. It was largely a Mark Carney campaign speech read in an extremely proper upper-class English accent, minus the ice hockey references, and also peppered with references to his mother's 1957 tour.) It is his constitutional duty to do so if requested (though normally one delegated to the viceroy) but it was a diplomatic risk because if Trump assumed that he was doing it as King of the United Kingdom (which is what he is primarily known as, at least outside the Commonwealth; it was remarkable when Charles went to Italy and referred to his Canadian title explicitly), and he didn't like what he heard from his "51st state", he might take out his retaliation not just on Canada but also the United Kingdom (and who knows, maybe other Commonwealth realms, too).
Given how many agreements Trump has torn up (trade treaties, approved by the Senate, including the USMCA he negotiated), why would they think any agreement with Trump had any binding power on Trump?
Edit: list of treaties broken by the Trump administration:
As a legal point, as I recall, trade agreements aren't considered treaties under US law and thus are approved by majorities in the House and Senate, not a Senate supermajority. But that's beside the point.
The reason to make trade agreements with the US under Trump regardless of how he's disregarded them is that at least you have one on paper, at least you can get a PR win when you say you have one, at least you can try to use what little sense of shame he might have left to keep him from breaking this one too egregiously. Other than CUSMA, all those agreements weren't his; CUSMA, meanwhile, was in many ways just NAFTA with a few tweaks (and a more comprehensive section on IP rights) which meant that it was still perceived in areas like the Rust Belt to be no better than NAFTA. (As I saw one economist put it, globalisation has arguably benefited 90% or more of the US population; it's just that the 10% who were hurt by it live disproportionately in swing states, so trade is a much bigger deal in elections than it actually is to the country as a whole.)
Also, he is technically abiding by CUSMA (outside of a few sectors like automobiles and steel; lumber is a separate question and has been a sore point in US-Canada relations for decades, long before Trump). He walked that back not long after that article was published. It's just that he's abiding by the strict letter of the agreement, rather than the spirit. The idea was that you could go through CUSMA certification and get no tariffs, or you could not do that and pay a tiny tariff. For big businesses, the cost of CUSMA certification was worth it (it's expensive and takes time); for small businesses, it was cheaper to just pay the tiny tariff. But now that tariff is at a much higher level and suddenly small businesses are being crushed under the cost either of the tariff or of going through the CUSMA process; meanwhile big businesses already have CUSMA certification. So the way in which Trump is abiding by CUSMA is just corporate welfare.
There is no discipline in the highest eschelons of the federal government, no coordinated effort. It is a whole bunch of attention junkies each trying to extract as much celebrity and news cycle minutes as possible. The fact that Donald Trump thinks saying a show has "very low ratings" is the worst insult he can make, is indicative of the fact he doesn't seem to differentiate between TV and reality. He refers to a confrontation with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office as "good TV". He turns reporters' questions into opportunities to promote his interior design show "This Old White House". There are definitely those around him that understand this and use that to manipulate the president into advancing their own agenda.
I appreciate the optimistic take that Trump’s overreach could swell the ranks of his opposition, but with Trump & Co regularly talking about third terms and a Supreme Court that enables him at every opportunity, I am not sure they much care about public sentiment or even dissent from within the Republican Party.
Emergencies can be declared. Elections can be postponed indefinitely. And all the buyers remorse in the world cannot change the fact that this administration has shown again and again that to them the constitution is an obstacle and constraint to be overcome, not a set of rules and standards to be followed.
This definitely describes the epistemic reality of many in the current administration. And they have taken this kind of self- harm to an extreme. But doesn't a version of this describe the challenge even well intentioned people face? Whether a person's main source of news is the NYT / NPR, cable news, social media or substack, he will not be able to accurately assess public sentiment unless he has a unique temperament and treats doing so as a full time job. And there are no shortcuts: we know that public opinion polls are wildly sensitive to how questions are phrased. Did people in the Biden admin accurately assess public sentiment on any of the contentious issues of the day? This admin may have lost its way faster than any in our nation’s history, but this is small consolation for those of us who recoil from hyper partisanship, the default governing philosophy of our age.
i think you're absolutely right. while we are in very very dangerous territory, the continued overplaying of their hand will backfire spectacularly. notice how everyone is now talking about freespeech and suddenly ck is last weeks news(finally) .
He’s not last week’s news, they’re gearing up to turn him into a full blown martyr and the reincarnation of MLK Jr.
Not to mention. memorial service fitting for a head of state or king. To passing a law in Congress making a Charlie Kirk Day and annual event like 9/11, as well as all of the other honors like the Presidential medal of Freedom.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the next honor he receives is a statue in the Capitol. And as a result, they’ll pass a bill limiting our ability to use words like fascist as an excuse to bring down the rhetoric and bring this nation closer together. It’s all a ruse; end of story!
Maybe. I think the White House is just having a psychotic break, unable to process the breakdown from their own hands. They have spent so much time gaslighting everyone in sight that they've completely lost the thread of public reality. If friggin' Ted Cruz can say what he said, we're in Bizzaro World. If Disney bounces back, it's curtains.
Right now they don't have to worry about opposition. Congress is largely controlled, and the President can just veto anything that might get through that body anyway to try to constrain him. The courts are captured. Any protest or resistance--peaceful or not--to the regime's next moves will be spun, by an increasingly captured media, as more evidence of the "violent left" and "antifa terrorists". Elections aren't for another year, giving time for states to further crack down on the ability to vote, with the courts signing off on all of it at the top.
It's depressing to think that the only realistic way out of this spiral for my southern neighbours would be a military coup, and after that you have a shadow of a democracy at best.
I had this exact thought earlier today, and I was asking myself if a military coup is the only way out of this. With the consolidation of media entities (including this one) into the hands of a few that have supported and have been enabled and enriched by the regime, all dissent will be squelched. As haphazard as this fascist clampdown may seem. It appears to have been a frightening success so far.
Thanks for this excellent article which gives reason for some optimism.
“Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner publicly slammed current CEO Bob Iger over Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, asking “Where has all the leadership gone?” and criticizing the “out-of-control intimidation” following FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s threats to Disney.”
While I agree, MAGA has jumped the shark, we may be too late to reverse course. MAGA has consolidated power and is essentially unchecked; they control every lever of power.
And this Kirk fiasco was the last straw. Ironically, Eisner was CEO at Disney we he cancelled Bill Mahar’s show Politically Incorrect (24 years ago), only to be replaced by Jimmy Kimmel; Mahar made a tasteless joke about the suicide bombers after 9/11 (pressure from Bush Whitehouse).
And now we have Eisner criticizing Iger, and Mahar siding with the fascists and thinking Kimmel was wrong for saying that republicans were doing their damndest to lay blame at the democrats feet; which they did. We’ve gone full circle!
This is reminiscent of Horst Wessel who became a propaganda symbol in Nazi Germany following his murder in 1930 by two members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Now we have Kirk, and god forbid we speak poorly of either man.
WTF just happened?????? As Mark Twain famously said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but if often rhymes!
Bottom line: We have been slowly descending into fascism since Trump took office. It reminds me of the story of the rich man who lost all his wealth. When asked how he lost all his money he replied, “gradually, then all at once!”
And here we are!….:)
Maher has definitely criticized the regime for this - and for other things lately.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/bill-maher-jimmy-kimmel-politically-incorrect-suspension-1236376591/
That’s not what I am talking g about. He also stated that Jimmy was wrong, when he didn’t get it wrong. Mahar tried to have it both ways. That’s my point!
One of the most dangerous things for anyone in any position of power is to silence or ignore critics. Such self-defeating moves block valuable information about one’s own vulnerabilities and blindspots, not to mention opportunities to benefit from useful ideas and expand support. Listening does not imply agreement. It does imply mature strength.
The miscalculation was that “normie America” knew and cared as much about Charlie Kirk as they did, saw the responses to his death as they did, and saw the proper course of action as total war on “the left”.
The reality is that “normie America” didn’t know much about Kirk, thinks murder is bad, and wants to lower the temperature, not raise it. They also know that the Troll in Chief is part of the problem.
Sending online mobs after baristas and Office Depot clerks and cheering their firing is not going to go well. Nor is using the power of government to go after comedians. Everything they have done since Kirk’s death is an overreaction.
Appreciate the more positive outlook here. Have to keep remembering that nothing’s set in stone and we do still have the power to save this democracy.
Who ever thought I would feel hopeful from something Ted Cruz said? I think it’s too early to know which way things will go. But another hopeful sign to me was red Ohio State Legislature putting out a bi-partisan statement condemning political violence and naming both Kirk and the Hortmans. If red Ohio wants to signal publicly bi-partisan cooperation, it is a public rejection of the twisted rhetoric coming from the White House. I do think trump’s state of malignant narcissism is driving the overreach we are seeing. He could have quietly continued implementing government takeover, but instead he is basically screaming “I am your Emperor, Goddammit! Look at my beautiful ballroom!”
That last line cracked me up because it’s so true. It’s what I hear whenever he says anything.
Can anyone explain why even the 'royal family' is sucking up to him? They all know what frauds the tRUMPS are! Seems like the only people not intimidated by this shit show are people not motivated by money. It was bad enough he disrespected Queen Elizabeth...Charles said...my turn! And of course the classless tRUMPs delivered...'people are saying'...
The Brits want more favorable tariffs.
The UK’s problem is our dire (post Brexit) economy. We simply cannot afford any collateral damage from Trump if we are to avoid electing our very own Trump acolyte.
King Charles is being deployed to try to minimise disruption while we pray for MAGA to crash and burn as soon as possible.
I understand and sympathise.
Perfidy is all we shall receive from Albion.
Brexit was akin to our mistake. Immigration used to fool the rubes into shoooting themselves in the foot
The UK really wants a favourable trade deal with the US. Trump admires the UK Royal Family (he wants his family to be the US equivalent; see also Mark Carney referencing only two specific locations as not being for sale when he met with Trump, those being the White House and Buckingham Palace) and they know it, so buttering him up like that is a political decision. The monarch largely acts on the advice of the government of the day.
This came up some months ago when Charles, as King of Canada, read the Speech from the Throne to open Parliament here back in May. (The speech itself was nothing remarkable. It was largely a Mark Carney campaign speech read in an extremely proper upper-class English accent, minus the ice hockey references, and also peppered with references to his mother's 1957 tour.) It is his constitutional duty to do so if requested (though normally one delegated to the viceroy) but it was a diplomatic risk because if Trump assumed that he was doing it as King of the United Kingdom (which is what he is primarily known as, at least outside the Commonwealth; it was remarkable when Charles went to Italy and referred to his Canadian title explicitly), and he didn't like what he heard from his "51st state", he might take out his retaliation not just on Canada but also the United Kingdom (and who knows, maybe other Commonwealth realms, too).
Given how many agreements Trump has torn up (trade treaties, approved by the Senate, including the USMCA he negotiated), why would they think any agreement with Trump had any binding power on Trump?
Edit: list of treaties broken by the Trump administration:
https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/broken-treaties-broken-government
As a legal point, as I recall, trade agreements aren't considered treaties under US law and thus are approved by majorities in the House and Senate, not a Senate supermajority. But that's beside the point.
The reason to make trade agreements with the US under Trump regardless of how he's disregarded them is that at least you have one on paper, at least you can get a PR win when you say you have one, at least you can try to use what little sense of shame he might have left to keep him from breaking this one too egregiously. Other than CUSMA, all those agreements weren't his; CUSMA, meanwhile, was in many ways just NAFTA with a few tweaks (and a more comprehensive section on IP rights) which meant that it was still perceived in areas like the Rust Belt to be no better than NAFTA. (As I saw one economist put it, globalisation has arguably benefited 90% or more of the US population; it's just that the 10% who were hurt by it live disproportionately in swing states, so trade is a much bigger deal in elections than it actually is to the country as a whole.)
Also, he is technically abiding by CUSMA (outside of a few sectors like automobiles and steel; lumber is a separate question and has been a sore point in US-Canada relations for decades, long before Trump). He walked that back not long after that article was published. It's just that he's abiding by the strict letter of the agreement, rather than the spirit. The idea was that you could go through CUSMA certification and get no tariffs, or you could not do that and pay a tiny tariff. For big businesses, the cost of CUSMA certification was worth it (it's expensive and takes time); for small businesses, it was cheaper to just pay the tiny tariff. But now that tariff is at a much higher level and suddenly small businesses are being crushed under the cost either of the tariff or of going through the CUSMA process; meanwhile big businesses already have CUSMA certification. So the way in which Trump is abiding by CUSMA is just corporate welfare.
There is no discipline in the highest eschelons of the federal government, no coordinated effort. It is a whole bunch of attention junkies each trying to extract as much celebrity and news cycle minutes as possible. The fact that Donald Trump thinks saying a show has "very low ratings" is the worst insult he can make, is indicative of the fact he doesn't seem to differentiate between TV and reality. He refers to a confrontation with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office as "good TV". He turns reporters' questions into opportunities to promote his interior design show "This Old White House". There are definitely those around him that understand this and use that to manipulate the president into advancing their own agenda.
I appreciate the optimistic take that Trump’s overreach could swell the ranks of his opposition, but with Trump & Co regularly talking about third terms and a Supreme Court that enables him at every opportunity, I am not sure they much care about public sentiment or even dissent from within the Republican Party.
Emergencies can be declared. Elections can be postponed indefinitely. And all the buyers remorse in the world cannot change the fact that this administration has shown again and again that to them the constitution is an obstacle and constraint to be overcome, not a set of rules and standards to be followed.
This definitely describes the epistemic reality of many in the current administration. And they have taken this kind of self- harm to an extreme. But doesn't a version of this describe the challenge even well intentioned people face? Whether a person's main source of news is the NYT / NPR, cable news, social media or substack, he will not be able to accurately assess public sentiment unless he has a unique temperament and treats doing so as a full time job. And there are no shortcuts: we know that public opinion polls are wildly sensitive to how questions are phrased. Did people in the Biden admin accurately assess public sentiment on any of the contentious issues of the day? This admin may have lost its way faster than any in our nation’s history, but this is small consolation for those of us who recoil from hyper partisanship, the default governing philosophy of our age.
Thank you! Finally, some hope, some light and not just doom and gloom on repeat.
Thank you, Mike. This is an excellent post and one that must be shared widely - with everyone.
Thank you for your good works to support and defend our Constitution and the rule of law and to secure the blessings of liberty for our posterity.
May our constitutional republic survive. May our country have a new birth of freedom.
Trump has to.
There is a natural pace of mission creep to a criminal enterprise.