Just a reminder: Outrage is the intended outcome. When we're outraged, we're saying, "Yes Donald! You win!"
What's the alternative? Instead of being outraged: doing the long, hard work of political change, crushing the Republicans in 2026 and 2028, and then spitting on their graves.
No one's going to like that answer.
UPDATE:I get e-mails now, from sources I've signed up to get newsletters from. I'm not sure how to provide links to them, since they're e-mails. Anyway, Joe Perticone note in his Substack, ..."the White House is fully leaning into the abuse of power as the president’s normal prerogative instead of trying to justify it in other terms or explain it away."
He reports:
Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” said in a Fox News interview that the flights will continue, and any judge’s contrariwise order is inconsequential to him.
“We are not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think,” he said. “I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.”White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt added in a statement that the court order has “no lawful basis.”
"No lawful basis." You are living in historic times.
I just want a chance to use the Adolescent Spite tag.
Trump has, apparently, taken over management of The Kennedy Center in DC., where he "recently replaced much of the board with MAGA performers and Fox News personalities and appointed himself chairman." * He has said he will pick the Kennedy Center Awards honorees. Like them or not, these are the most prestigious cultural awards in the US, and many recent honorees have, in fact, used the occasion to express their opinions about The Donald.
No more. Expect Kid Rock and Kanye to be the next honorees, ** and maybe something like this on the main stage?
Stay tuned.
* - Read the whole article for what passes for horrific fun these days.
** - This is the same guy who gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh and Antonin Scalia.
Can I say something about all this angst about Senator Chuck Schumer? He's being vilified for allowing the Republicans' continuing resolution (to fund the government at current levels for six months) to come to the floor of the Senate for a vote, which everyone knew the majority would win. The Senate Republicans needed 60 votes to get the CR to the floor of the Senate. If all the Democrats voted against it, it could not come up for a vote, and the Federal government would "shut down" (a relative term). The reason to oppose the continuing resolution was that it wasn't a "clean CR," which would simply continue funding for the government. It had a large number of "poison pills" in it: legislative items which would not be approved on their own, including (in a shout-out to the previous post) and item which gave Trump even more power to impose tariffs.
So why did Schumer, the Senate minority leader, allow it to come to the floor? Heather Cox Richardson tells us:
(Schumer) argued that permitting the Republicans to shut down the government would not only hurt people. It would also give Trump and his sidekick billionaire Elon Musk full control over government spending, he said, because under a shutdown, the administration gets to determine which functions of the government are essential and which are not.
She goes on to make the case that Musk and Trump wanted the CR to fail:
Musk wanted a government shutdown because it would make it easier to get rid of hundreds of thousands of government workers. During a shutdown, the executive branch determines which workers are essential and which are not...
And, in the end, we'll let Chuck have his say:
Trump and Elon Musk want a shutdown. We should not give them one. The risk of allowing the president to take even more power via a government shutdown is a much worse path.
A shutdown would have international repercussions. The Republicans would try to blame the Democrats, but, I mean, come on. Republicans control both Houses and the Presidency. Shutting down is their fault (demonstrably - without the poison pills they added, it would pass unanimously). And Trump and Musk are already acting, and have been for over a month, as if the government were already shut down and they had been authorized to make cuts that wouldn't have been legal before the shutdown. A shutdown might very well terminate, or damage, the lawsuits which are all that is keeping some agencies alive.
So, it's complicated, and that's just my point. Schumer did what he thought was best, and gave reasons for it. Your mileage may vary.
The on-again, off-again tariff threats have created a situation... in which the smart money has decided that the new administration is in the process of squandering all of the pro-business good will it rode in on to cater to the president's "insane" whims on tariff policy.
I know that I am, and have been, a little obsessive about my study of history and politics, so I don't expect other folks to be picking apart everything that happens in those realms. But he told us all about his "insane" tariff policies, in some detail, and it didn't sound to me like something good. On the campaign trail he described - without using the term - a trade war, which (like most wars) is not good for anyone.
Interestingly enough, the hedge fund guy quoted above goes on to note that Trump was just as "insane" during his first term, but his Secretary of the Treasury kept him from damaging the economy:
...part of the reason for the recent volatility is that Wall Street has realized that "there's no Steve Mnuchin around this time." Mnuchin, the treasury secretary during Trump 1, may have been the one man who kept the president from his own worst economic impulses. Without a Mnuchin-like figure having Trump's ear, he said, there are no guardrails left.
That's interesting - and important. I have no sympathy for people who are surprised by this (he literally said he was going to do it) but there are many of us who feel that all this might be a passing fancy, and maybe he'll move on to something else. However, with nothing to guide him but his own narcissistic impulses - maybe not.
I feel like adding a new tag: adolescent spite. An eighth grader picking on the class nerd to get in good with the bullies. How else to interpret the cleansing of the Arlington National Cemetery's website of the “histories highlighting Black, Hispanic and women veterans.” This includes ghosting Gen. Colin Powell, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and dozens of Medal of Honor recipients. They're just gone. Some are still available at a walled-off section of the website not available from the site itself.
The educational services cleansing include “web pages focusing on African American history, Women’s history, Reconstruction, and the Civil War have been removed from the educational page of Arlington’s website. “ This includes lesson plans and other materials designed to help teachers teach about the cemetery itself, its history and wider topics in American military and cultural history.
The Administration explains that it is part of the attempt to dismantle DEI, and calls it a “digital content refresh.” The former reveals staggering ignorance; the latter should remind you of Orwell's “1984.”
So the story of Charles Calvin Rogers, who won the Medal of Honor for his leadership in defending a forward fire support base in Vietnam, during which he was seriously wounded, and who later rose to the rank of brigadier general, is gone. The New Jim Crow segregates him to the colored section, separate but unequal.
How's your story doing?
