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The Trump "Landslide" That Wasn’t

Donald Trump seems poised to make a mistake that too many elected officials have made over the years: due to hubris and ego and claiming to have won a "landslide" and been given a "mandate" to pursue a course of policies and legislation that opposed by a significant minority - if not a majority - of voters they set the stage for a backlash.  Here in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin made such a mistake and pushed unpopular policies with the result that two years into his term, Democrats captured control of both houses of the Virginia General Assembly and Youngkin will leave office having had less than a memorable term in office.  While Trump and his MAGA political whores keep saying they have a mandated to implement Trump's policies, including aspects of Project 2025 highly unpopular with and opposed by a majority of Americans, the truth is that while Trump managed to win the popular vote, his margin of victory was very narrow and there was no landslide and there clearly is no mandate. Moreover, he did not win a majority of all votes.  Of course, Trump's ego will never allow him to accept this reality and the fanatics within his circle of MAGA cultists live in too much of a bubble to gage how unpopular much of their agenda is in fact. Expect hubris filled over reach and a possible voter backlash in two years time.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Trump's non-existent "landslide."  Here are excerpts:

On the night he won a second term, President-elect Donald J. Trump rejoiced in the moment. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he boasted. In the two weeks since, his campaign has repeatedly heralded his “landslide,” even to market Trump merchandise like the “Official Trump Victory Glass.”

But by traditional numeric measures, Mr. Trump’s victory was neither unprecedented nor a landslide. In fact, he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the coattails of a true landslide.

The disconnect goes beyond predictable Trumpian braggadocio. The incoming president and his team are trying to cement the impression of a “resounding margin,” as one aide called it, to make Mr. Trump seem more popular than he is and strengthen his hand in forcing through his agenda in the months to come.

The collapse of Matt Gaetz’s prospective nomination for attorney general on Thursday demonstrated the challenges for Mr. Trump in forcing a Republican Congress to defer to his more provocative ideas.

With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Mr. Trump winning the popular vote with 49.997 percent as of Thursday night, and he appears likely to fall below that once the final results are in, meaning he would not capture a majority. Another count used by CNN and other outlets shows him winning 49.9 percent. By either reckoning, his margin over Vice President Kamala Harris was about 1.6 percentage points, the third smallest since 1888, and could ultimately end up around 1.5 points.

“If the definition of landslide is you win both the popular vote and Electoral College vote, that’s a new definition,” said Lynn Vavreck, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Identity Crisis” about Mr. Trump’s first election, in 2016. “I would not classify this outcome as a landslide that turns into evidence of desire for a huge shift of direction or policy.”

As he assembles a cabinet and administration during the transition, Mr. Trump is certainly acting as if he has the kind of political capital that comes from a big victory. Rather than picking lieutenants with wide appeal, he is opting for highly unconventional figures with scandals to explain, almost as if trying to bend Senate Republicans to his will.

Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did. Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections.

George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later.

“Trump’s appointments have already demonstrated that he will continue a bipartisan tradition of presidents over-reading their electoral mandate,” said Doug Sosnik, who was a White House senior adviser to Mr. Clinton.

Real landslides have been unmistakable, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964 by 22.6 points, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1972 by 23.2 points and Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 by 18.2 points. In the 40 years since that Reagan victory, no president has won the popular vote by double digits.

[G]ood is never good enough for Mr. Trump, who typically offers a constant fountain of self-describing superlatives like “the best,” “the most,” “the biggest” and so on regardless of the topic. Rarely encumbered by contravening facts, Mr. Trump has long claimed to be more popular than he is.

So it should come as no surprise that Mr. Trump would frame his latest victory in grandiose terms. . . . . Mr. Trump’s allies know the path to his heart lies in flattering him, and some have adopted the mantra.

Mr. Trump’s 1.6-point victory is smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. In addition, two presidents won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote: the second Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016.

Moreover, Mr. Trump had limited coattails this month. With some races yet to be called, Republicans were on track to keep almost exactly the same narrow majority in the House that they already had. The party picked up four seats in the Senate, enough to take control, a major shift that will benefit Mr. Trump. But even then, in the places where Mr. Trump campaigned the most, he failed to bring Republicans along with him in four of five battleground states with Senate races.

“This election was more of a repudiation of Biden and the Democrats than it was a vote for Trump,” said Mr. Sosnik. “A normal Republican candidate should have picked up at least eight Senate and 30-plus House seats given that the incumbent Democratic president had a job approval in the thirties with 70 percent of voters believing that the country was headed in the wrong direction.”

Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the younger Mr. Bush’s successful re-election campaign in 2004, said the only mandate that Mr. Trump won was to make the economy better.

“A majority of folks on Election Day didn’t like or trust Trump and thought he was too extreme,” he said. “The non-MAGA folks who voted for him did it despite Trump, not because of Trump. They were voting against Biden more than they were voting for Trump.”

“But given his razor-thin majorities in Congress,” he added, “he will fail to gain the support of Republicans from swing districts who will predictably fear defeat in the midterm elections if they enact legislation destroying Obamacare or increasing tariffs in ways that will impose shattering burdens on millions of voters.”

Let's hope the backlash begins quickly and that swing district Republicans put their own reelection needs over Trump's false, ego driven claims of a mandate.

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The Scary Truth Behind Trump's Win

In the aftermath of the 2024 election, much of the media is repeating the mistake made in 2016 and attribution Trump's victory to worries over the economy and economic conditions.  The truth is far scarier and paints a far less flattering image of Trump voters.  This is partly exposed by the same Republicans who panned the economy under Biden/Harris even though the underlying data said otherwise suddenly have a far rosier view of the economy even though nothing has change and, more significantly, Trump's economic proposals will send consumer prices and interest rates soaring.  The real and more frightening truth is that many Trump voters despise liberal democracy where the civil rights and economic prospects of marginalized groups - think non-whites, non-Christians, and LGBT citizens - have improved and equality has become more real.  These voters want a return to the white dominated, white privilege days of the 1950's where women, blacks, Hispanics, and gays knew their place and white males were supreme. Worse yet, many Americans are not as nice as they pretend to be and they have little compunction about harming those they dislike as noted in a piece in The Atlantic:

[T]he Trump movement has never been, to my mind, strictly concerned with tangible issues; part of the allure is immaterial by nature, addressed to elemental human urges. Trump offered something special on that count from the beginning—a politics consisting not mainly of a positive vision but rather of a series of opportunities to own the libs. In this project, rational policy details aren’t a priority and are sometimes absent altogether; the point is domination of one’s enemies, a libidinal desire.

Consider the recent post-election slogan “Your body, my choice,” also engineered to upset and humiliate liberals: It’s an overt statement of sex and dominion. And Trump draws that out in people. . . . . Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them.

Trump, Greenberg wrote, “urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts, aspirations to justice.” Trump is, in other words, an atavist, inviting citizens to satisfy all of their hungry drives, all of their libidinous instincts: His America is a place for malign energies to express themselves in action. There’s a certain pleasure in that, perhaps, a kind of psychic relief—to lose oneself in a radical movement and to express feelings normally prohibited by society.

Cruelty and subjugation of others is the point. Sadly, too many are afraid to call out Trump voters for who they are and instead the smoke screen of "economic concerns" masks the real story.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality further: 

Kamala Harris was defeated, economists tell us, by rising prices. Simply put, the vice president could not overcome working-class voters’ anger over the rise in the cost of living, for which they blamed the Biden administration.

But this narrative focuses on the wrong question: why Harris lost. The more relevant question is how Donald Trump could have won. Malaise over the price level cannot possibly explain the reelection of probably one of the most destabilizing politicians the world has seen since the end of World War II.

Explaining the rise of Trump as a consequence of economic forces battering the working class is not a new approach. In 2016, we were told the culprit was globalization and the related “China shock” that destroyed 1 million or so manufacturing jobs.

Just like today, this analysis misses the forest for the trees. Twice already, more or less half of American voters have elected a guy who promises to overthrow the liberal world order — to do away with democratic institutions, values, and norms, trample on human rights, blow up the economy — and to bend the nation, and the world, to his will.

While voters might be forgiven for 2016 on the grounds that they hadn’t fully understood what Trump was talking about, this year they knew well what they were doing.

The economic interpretation of voters’ embrace of Trump is suspect not just because it is so narrow. For all the polls demonstrating Americans’ grim assessment of the economy, consumers have kept up spending as if they have few worries in the world. For all the gripes about the cost of living, real wages for typical American workers have been rising faster than inflation.

The idea that Democrats could have stopped Trump if only they had picked a candidate not entangled with the Biden administration’s economic record misses the point. Trump shifted the Overton window, allowing Americans to express profound hostility not only toward economic policymaking and its consequences but also toward the whole tapestry of modern society.

While identifying strands of voters’ discontent can be useful, the analysis must not miss sight of what Nov. 5 revealed about their broad-based disgust. To steer voters away from Trump’s “blow it all up” approach will require figuring out how to invite them into a country that feels alien to so many — a society that is continually changing to embrace new peoples, cultures and technologies, products, environmental constraints, languages, religions, forms of expression, gender identities, sexual affinities, and so on. Voters’ disgust might appear as though it is aimed at venal leaders out of touch with the salt of the earth. But it amounts to a rejection of what America is becoming.

But the disgust has other strands. Take immigration. It is hardly nuts for Americans to recoil at the idea of hundreds of thousands of foreigners entering the country illegally. But the animosity toward migrants runs deeper, feeding on aging White voters’ fears of demographic decline that has enabled the “Great Replacement” narrative promoted by the likes of Tucker Carlson.

In a NORC survey in 2017 that focused on questions related to American identity, almost half of respondents said that illegal immigration amounted to a threat to “the American way of life.” Seventy-one percent of respondents to that poll said the United States was “losing its national identity.”

This unease extends to other dimensions, such as religion and sexuality. Overall, 52 percent of respondents to a poll last year by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution thought that America’s best days are behind it. Fifty-five percent, including three quarters of Republicans, said the country’s way of life has mostly changed for the worse since the 1950s.

Altogether, three-fourths of Americans today believe the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Fewer than one-third believe the country is a well-functioning democracy.

The idea that American voters expressed their economic malaise at the polls comes attached to a bolder claim: that Harris’s loss was merely part of a worldwide anti-incumbent fever caused by post-pandemic inflation.

The challenge for the standard-bearers of capitalist liberal democracy is not to offer a better strategy against the vagaries of the economic cycle. It is to bring aboard the many citizens who reject where liberal market democracy has brought them. The challenge is urgent, because the other side is offering to end liberal democracy altogether.

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Republicans Are the True Cancel Culture Warriors

One hears much bloviating and warnings about Democrats and liberals leading a cancel culture that seeks to censor those not sufficiently politically correct.   Yet, as a column in the New York Times lays out, the true cancel culture warriors are not on the left, but rather among Republicans and MAGA cultists who want to erase entire groups of citizens or to condemn them to a marginalized status. The irony of the 2024 election was that many black and Hispanic men voted for Trump even though they are among those MAGA seeks to erase, deport or take back to a Jim Crow like era. Surveys indicate that voters who were the least informed or rarely followed politics voted for Trump by significant margins, suggesting that these voters may not have had any idea of what they were truly voting for.   It is the political right that wants "don't say gay" laws, book banning, the elimination of non-discrimination laws, and forced right wing "Christian" indoctrination in public schools. Oh, and did I mention the mass deportation of Hispanic migrants?  The political correctness of the far left pales in comparison to the right's agenda of bringing back the racism and white heterosexual domination of the 1950's. Many who voted for Trump are likely in for a brutal surprise when they find themselves targeted.  Here are column highlights:

In the days since the election, I’ve read thousands of words of Democratic introspection. This was the election that repudiated cancel culture, campus protests and identity politics. This was the election that transformed the debate about everything from trans people’s participation in sports to the use of niche ideological words like “Latinx.”

According to this commentary, the lesson is clear: Democratic identity politics and the Democratic Party’s move to the left cost the party working-class voters and alienated the great American middle. If Democrats want to win again, they have to shed their ideological baggage, meet American voters where they are and stop scolding them when they’re puzzled by the ever-shifting ideological demands (and language policing) of the very online left.

I agree with much of this. . . . There has been an intense amount of intolerance in far-left spaces, and not just on campuses. There is a need for a reckoning.

But let’s be very clear about the course of this election. One candidate leaned away from the extremism of her base, and she lost. The other candidate leaned into the worst excesses of his movement, and he won.

Kamala Harris spent her short campaign running away from the excesses of the left. She abandoned her most left-wing positions. She wasn’t using left-wing buzzwords, and rather than cancel ideological opposition, she tried to create the largest possible tent, stretching from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

Donald Trump’s campaign, by contrast, reveled in its most vicious language. It’s not necessary to recount every outrage, but we can’t forget that Trump and his allies spent days falsely accusing Haitian migrants of eating ducks and pets. My news colleagues accurately described Trump’s election-closing Madison Square Garden rally as a “carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.”

MAGA’s problems extend well beyond the campaign. In fact, every dysfunction you’ve seen on the far left has emerged on the far right, and the far right hasn’t been repudiated; it’s been empowered. Dissenting Americans should brace themselves for an assault on free speech, extreme intolerance and a vicious form of cancel culture that includes an avalanche of threats and intimidation.

And make no mistake, the most intolerant campus activists in America could take notes from MAGA. In the past eight years, we’ve seen MAGA threaten and intimidate election workers and school board members. We’ve seen MAGA engage in its own forms of cancel culture. It targets critics for termination and public humiliation, and when red America became Trumpified, it embarked on crackdown after crackdown on free speech.

In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis’s administration enacted unconstitutional limitations on the free speech of social media companies, university professors and private corporations. Across the United States, activists initiated a wave of efforts to remove books from school libraries.

In my home county in Tennessee, Moms for Liberty activists even used the state’s anti-critical-race-theory law as a pretext for (unsuccessfully) attempting to ban the book “Ruby Bridges Goes to School” from the elementary school curriculum. Bridges was the 6-year-old Black girl who desegregated New Orleans public schools, and her courage is memorialized in Norman Rockwell’s famous painting . . . .

MAGA hostility to L.G.B.T.Q. expression culminated in a series of bills aimed at drag queens and L.G.B.T.Q.-related speech in public schools..

If you’re alarmed by social media mobs and vicious online rhetoric, MAGA perfected the art of calling critics of its speech codes groomers and implying they’re pro-pedophile.

And while MAGA mocked the term “Latinx” as a silly and offensive virtue signal, it cheered as Trump declared that the Biden administration’s acceptance of immigrants was “poisoning the blood” of our country. I dislike the term “Latinx,” as do a vast majority of Latinos, but it’s far less offensive or empirically disgusting than the idea that people entering the country seeking a better life were somehow poisoning our blood.

From Tucker Carlson’s documentary on masculinity that featured heroic images of testicle tanning to the bizarre Christian nationalists who want to repeal the 19th Amendment (which granted women the right to vote) to the junk science of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Oz, the right has become the home for multiple strands of conspiracy quackery.

It’s important to chronicle MAGA’s excesses, but it’s also important to understand why its intolerance and bizarre ideas weren’t ballot box poison. If Americans hate intolerance and bullying, why did a critical mass of Americans vote against the party that was moving away from its extremes?

I have a few theories:

First, don’t make this too complicated. This election was mainly about prices and the border. Discussions of wokeness and cancel culture are more or less beside the point. They’re topics more for the engaged elite and not for the mass of Americans who voted on Nov. 5.

Second, if it’s not just the economy, then is it also civic ignorance? Do voters even know how strange and intolerant parts of the right have become? One of the most fascinating elements of the election was the stark information divide.

According to a poll from the left-leaning group Data for Progress, Harris won among the voters who said they paid attention to the news “a great deal” or “a lot,” while Trump won by decisive margins among those who paid attention “a moderate amount,” “a little” or “not at all.” Trump won those who don’t pay attention at all by 51 to 32. . . . You can’t vote against actions or ideas that you don’t know a thing about.

Third — and most ominously — Americans are turning their backs on liberty, tolerance and decency. America possesses a unique culture, but it does not possess a unique people. We’re prone to the same sins and flaws as the people of any other nation, and protecting the rights and dignity of our opponents is just not something that comes naturally to us. It’s a learned behavior, modeled by leaders, and when leaders stop modeling tolerance and decency, Americans are prone to backslide to fear and animosity.

The founders understood this reality clearly. That’s why they kept concentrated power out of the hands of a single person and created separate branches of government. That’s why they removed civil liberties from majoritarian control through the Bill of Rights. But throughout history, we’ve been tempted to reject their wisdom, blow through constitutional safeguards and suppress the freedoms of people we despise.

In this analysis, Trump’s fury and MAGA’s intolerance are assets, but only if they’re targeting the right people. Americans don’t hate cancel culture in the abstract; they hate being canceled. At the same time, all too many of us are more than happy to cancel others, especially if we deem their ideas dangerous or immoral.

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The False Sense of Shock Over Trump's Nominees

Throughout his campaign Donald Trump promised to tear Washington apart and to seek vengeance on those he claimed had wronged him as well as use the U.S. military for the mass deportation of undocumented migrants.   Now that he is president elect, he is nominating a circus of unqualified individuals to cabinet positions where they will wreak havoc on the professional civil service ranks and faithfully pursue Trump's agenda of turning Washington upside down.  In the height of disingenuousness many Republicans and even some MAGA voters are expressing shock over Trump's nominations, his push to implement Project 2025, and promised mass deportation plan which may involve declaring a so-called state of emergency.  Had they listened to Trump was saying and those who tried to warn them of Trump's unfitness for office, NONE of what's occurring should be a surprise. The same holds true for many in the media who are now wringing their hands.  The only sweet irony is that those who claim to have voted for Trump due to higher prices are about to get slammed with further significant price increases when Trump's tariffs kick in. A piece in The Atlantic looks at this false sense of shock and all the indicators that were ignored.  Here are highlights:

At a rally in Las Vegas in September, the reggaeton star Nicky Jam came onstage in a Make America Great Again hat and endorsed Donald Trump. “We need you. We need you back, right? We need you to be the president,” he said. But after a comedian at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last month called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” the singer—whose father is Puerto Rican and who was raised partly on the island—had second thoughts.

He had no right to be surprised. Trump himself had previously gone after Puerto Rico—he punished its leaders for criticizing him after Hurricane Maria, and sought to swap it for Greenland—but even if Nicky Jam had missed or forgotten that, he had to know who Trump was.

Nicky Jam was ahead of the curve. Since the election, Trump has moved swiftly to do things he’d said he’d do, and yet many people—especially his own supporters—seem stunned and dismayed. This is absurd. . . . after four years as president, culminating in an attempt to erase an election he lost, Trump has demonstrated who he is. Somehow, the delusion of Trump à la carte—take the lib-owning, take the electoral wins, but pass on all of the unsavory stuff—persists.

In an article about how Trump’s transition is “shocking the Washington establishment,” Peter Baker of The New York Times writes: “Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is.”

On K Street, Politico reports, health-care-industry lobbyists can’t believe that Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. They were “expecting a more conventional pick,” even though Trump emphasized Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda late in the campaign, and even though Kennedy said that Trump had promised him control of HHS. To be sure, Kennedy is a shocking and disturbing pick . . . . but his nomination should not come as a surprise—especially for people whose entire business proposition is being highly paid to advise clients on how Washington actually works.

Meanwhile, the New York Post, a key pillar of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media juggernaut, is similarly jittery about the Kennedy choice. . . . . The columnist Michael Godwin, who beamed on November 9 that Trump’s victory “offers the promise of progress on so many fronts that it already feels like Morning in America again,” was back a week later to complain that “it’s not a close call to say” that Kennedy and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, are “unfit” for the roles.

The lobbyists and editorialists are in good company, or at least in some sort of company. On Capitol Hill, Republican senators say they are shocked by many of Trump’s Cabinet picks. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who notoriously professed surprise when Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, is “shocked” at the Gaetz nomination. Gaetz’s House Republican colleagues are “stunned and disgusted.”

Reactions to Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense are less vitriolic, if no less baffled.  . . . . . If this is true, the senators could perhaps do with some better staff work. Hegseth was a real possibility to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration; more to the point, he was a prominent figure on Fox News, which is a dominant force in the Republican Party, from whose ranks Trump has repeatedly drawn appointees.

Staffers at the affected agencies have also expressed shock and horror at the prospect of an Attorney General Gaetz, a Defense Secretary Hegseth, or a Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Ordinary Americans may also be taken aback. As I reported last month, Trump critics were concerned about a “believability gap,” in which voters opposed some of Trump’s big policy ideas, sometimes quite strongly, but just didn’t trust that he would really do those things. Although they perhaps deserve more grace than the Republican officials and power brokers who are astonished, they also had ample warning about who Trump is and how he’d govern.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. He’s appointing officials such as Stephen Miller and Tom Homan who are committed to that, and yesterday morning, Trump confirmed on Truth Social a report that he would declare a national emergency and use the military to conduct mass deportations. And yet, when the roundups start in January, many people are somehow going to be taken by surprise. 

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Offensive Texts Targets LGBT Community

Donald Trump may claim - when does he not lie? - that he knows nothing about Project 2025, largely a white "Christian" nationalist agenda, but his cabinet nominations and mass deportation plans show that his regime is posed to go full speed ahead in implementing that agenda.  Equally frightening for black, Hispanic and LGBT Americans is the atmosphere which is encouraging the spewing of hate against communities targeted by Project 2025.  Hate filled text have targeted blacks and told them among other things to report to plantations and Hispanics have been threatened with deportation.  Now, LGBT Americans have been added to the target list even as a MAGA Republican has introduced a bill that would bar transgender individuals from using restrooms in the U. S. Capitol.  Fear is palpable within elements of the LGBT community as Project 2025 and its devotes seek to end same sex marriage, repeal non-discrimination protections and even revive sodomy laws to criminalize same sex relationships.  Indeed, some worry just how bad things may get and I will admit I've check a few resources on moving abroad if it becomes necessary.  It is frightening that people we know voted for this kind of hatred. A piece in the New York Times looks at the current text threats to LGBT citizens.  Here are highlights:

A wave of offensive text messages and emails has gone out to Hispanic and L.G.B.T.Q. people in recent days, according to the F.B.I., coming on the heels of a barrage of racist texts that were sent to Black people in the wake of the election.

The F.B.I. said in a statement on Friday that some recipients of the latest messages were told they had been selected for deportation. Others were instructed to report to a “re-education camp” for L.G.B.T.Q. people, the agency said, an apparent reference to conversion therapy or other coercive practices aimed at altering a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The messages were the latest in a series of offensive content that started popping up just hours after the presidential race was called for Donald J. Trump the morning after Election Day. . . . Some of the messages also made a reference to Mr. Trump — some even claimed to be from his administration — but a spokesman for his campaign said it had “absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.”

Misogynistic social media posts also surged in the aftermath of the election, with phrases like “your body, my choice” and “get back to the kitchen” proliferating online.

Diana Brier, 41, who identifies as lesbian, said she was shocked after receiving one of the texts targeting L.G.B.T.Q. people last Sunday. The message she got referred to an executive order and instructed her to check in to be transported to an undisclosed location for an “LGB re-education camp.” It also mentioned Mr. Trump and the date of his inauguration.

Ms. Brier said the specificity of the message had unsettled her. While she knew it was not real, she said it made her worry about what could happen to L.G.B.T.Q. people under the new Trump administration.

“The timing is not a coincidence,” Ms. Brier said, referring to when the message arrived and what it said. “There’s a lot of concern among my queer friends about what’s going to happen to us.”

The F.B.I. did not clarify how widespread the recent round of messages was or how the senders got the recipients’ identities. It was also unclear whether the messages came from the same source as the texts that targeted Black people.

Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, an L.G.B.T.Q. civil rights group, said in a statement that the hateful rhetoric could have real-life consequences.  “But hate will not silence us,” she said.

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The Dark, Unspoken Promise of Trump’s Return

The media continues to float economic concerns as the principal motivation for those that abandoned Democrats and voted for Donald Trump. Never mind that Trump's proposed tariffs and mass deportation of migrants, many of whom harvest agricultural products will cause price increases that will make post-Covid inflation look tame. This excuse also overlooks the reality that Trump's main offering to his supporters was amplifying grievances - mostly for white racists and whites fearing a loss of white privilege - and heaping hate on assorted others, particularly migrants, blacks, gays and Muslims, all of whom should fear for the future.  Trump also offered a perverted form of machismo that seemingly attracted Latino and Black males who insanely ignored the reality that they are members of groups targeted by Trump's white "Christian" nationalist agenda. Putting down women with slogans like "your body, my choice" apparently thrilled some of these men, but it will not save them when deportations start or non-discrimination protections are rolled back. The entire underlying current was and is one of self-centeredness with no thought for the collective good and greenlighting Trump's push towards authoritarianism.  A column in the New York Times looks at this phenomenon: 

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in charge. What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves . . . .

Trump’s first term, and his actions in the four years since, tracked the early record of Putin and Orban in important ways. Looking closely at their trajectories, through the lens of Magyar’s theories, gives a chillingly clear sense of where Trump’s second term may lead.

Magyar is Hungarian, and has extensively studied the autocracy of Orban. Like Trump, Orban had been cast out of office (in 2002, in a vote his supporters said had been fraudulent); he didn’t regain power until eight years later. In the interim, he consolidated his movement, positioning himself and his party as the only true representatives of the Hungarian people. It followed that the sitting government was illegitimate and that anyone who supported it was not part of the nation. When Orban was re-elected, he carried out what Magyar calls an “autocratic breakthrough,” changing laws and practices so that he could not be dislodged again.

Trump, similarly, spent four years attacking the Biden administration, and the vote that brought it to the White House, as fraudulent, and positioning himself as the only true voice of the people. He is also returning with a power trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress. He too can quickly reshape American government in his image.

Trump and his supporters have shown tremendous hostility to civic institutions — the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits, some religious groups — that seek to define and enforce our obligations to one another. . . . . he will likely begin by getting rid of experts, regulators and other civil servants he sees as superfluous, eliminating jobs that he thinks simply shouldn’t exist. Expect asylum officers to be high on that list.

A major target outside of government will be universities. In Hungary, the Central European University, a pioneering research and educational institution (and Magyar’s academic home), was forced into exile. To understand what can happen to public universities in the United States, look at Florida, where the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis has effectively turned the state university system into a highly policed arm of his government. The MAGA movement’s attack on private universities has been underway for some time . . . . Watch for moves to strip private universities of federal funding and tax breaks. Under this kind of financial pressure, even the largest and wealthiest universities will cut jobs and shutter departments; smaller liberal arts colleges will go out of business.

Civil society groups — especially those that serve or advocate for immigrants, formerly incarcerated people, L.G.B.T.Q. people, women and vulnerable groups — will be attacked. Then they may come for the unions.

In an Opinion article in The Washington Post, the publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger, laid out some probable scenarios for a Trump administration’s war on the media. I would add that, like Orban — and like the first Trump administration — this president will reward loyal media with privileged access and will attack critical media by targeting its owners’ other businesses.

Kamala Harris’s campaign, of course, tried to warn Americans about this and a lot more, labeling Trump a fascist. . . . . The Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, author of the book “How Fascism Works,” has argued that fascists are defined less by political beliefs than by the way they do politics: by trafficking in fear and hatred of the “other,” by affirming the supremacy of “us” over “them.” All of which describes Trump, doesn’t it?

Orban used the fear and hatred of immigrants to declare a state of emergency when refugees from the Middle East started coming to Europe in 2015. (He later used the Covid-19 pandemic and then the Russia-Ukraine war as pretexts to adopt emergency powers.) Trump, during his first term, similarly declared a national emergency in connection with the arrival of asylum seekers at the southern border of the United States.

Magyar describes autocratic breakthrough as the transition from the rule of law to the law of rule. When Putin campaigned for president in 2000, his slogan was “Dictatorship of the Law.” . . . . He proceeded to rule by decree, as Orban does now and as Trump did in his first term — and has said he intends to do in his second.

As to the specifics, we know less than we may think we know. Had Trump been elected to a second term in 2020, Magyar says he would have expected him to try to repeal the 22nd Amendment, which established a two-term limit for presidents. I think he may still try to do it, clearing the way to run again at the age of 82. Much has been written about Project 2025 as a sort of legislative blueprint for the second Trump presidency. . . . . the document is more a reflection of the clan of people who empower Trump and are empowered by him than an ideological document. It is not a blueprint for coherent legislative change, but it is a blueprint still: a blueprint for trampling the system of government as it is currently constituted, a blueprint of destruction.

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Trump’s National Security Wrecking Crew

Some in the media ridiculously speculated that perhaps Donald Trump would opt to make his second term more "normal;" so as to cement his legacy.  This fantasy ignored (i) that Trump is a malignant narcist set on revenge for real or imagined slights, and (ii) that Trump is, in my view, a Russian asset only too happy to weaken America to further Vladimir Putin's goals.   Some of Trump's cabinet nominees certainly appear to be in line with the latter and one columnist described the situation as "Trump does not so much assemble a Cabinet as cast a reality show." Living in an area with a large military presence, one has to wonder what an assault on the military leadership will do to morale and recruitment, not that Trump and/or Pete Hegseth, nominee for defense secretary, seem to care. Ditto for Tulsi Gabbard as nominee for director of national intelligence.  Putin and America's adversaries must be celebrating while allies are shuddering at what appears to be a deliberate weakening of America and sowing of chaos.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump's wrecking crew: 

American voters gave Donald Trump a solid win on Election Day. But they didn’t give him a wrecking ball to destroy the country’s military and intelligence agencies.

That’s what’s so scary about Trump’s nominations of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard as secretary of defense and director of national intelligence, respectively. Neither is remotely qualified for two of the most important management jobs in government. They’re polemicists and ideologues — wreckers, to be blunt, rather than builders. If confirmed, they would do more to doom Trump’s presidency than Democrats ever could.

Trump is a disrupter, and this latest set of nominations (including Matt Gaetz for attorney general) has shown that he hopes to overturn what he imagines as the “deep state.” Trump’s bark was worse than his bite during his first term. But now he is gathering a war cabinet for what seems to be a serious assault on the leadership of the military and the intelligence community.

Hegseth’s nomination is especially dangerous. On Fox News, he has made a career out of denouncing the senior military leaders he would direct as defense secretary. His recent book, “The War on Warriors,” includes personal attacks on Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations. He smears them, in effect, as diversity hires.

He describes what he regards as the current military ethos with an imaginary call to arms, “We will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything!” This is crazy nonsense.

Hegseth won’t be running a Fox talk show if he’s confirmed. He will have absolute power to fire any general officer who doesn’t meet Trump’s political standards. The Wall Street Journal reports that the transition team is already drafting an executive order for a “warrior board” to recommend generals and admirals for dismissal. A Journal editorial Thursday sounded the right warning: “The military isn’t Mr. Trump’s enemy, and a purge mentality will court political trouble and demoralize the ranks.”

Trump started off with reasonable enough nominees for his national security team. Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Michael Waltz, both of Florida, are solid choices for secretary of state and national security adviser. Both have worked with Democrats on defense and intelligence issues, and neither would send America’s allies and partners rushing for the exits.

Rubio, like most Republicans, has been swept up in the Trump tornado. But he worked effectively as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee with Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) And in private, he’s said to be a solid supporter of Ukraine’s struggle to resist Russia’s invasion. It’s a mark of Rubio’s good sense that the MAGA right reportedly wants to derail his nomination.

Waltz is a surprise choice but not a terrible one. With his service as an Army Green Beret in Iraq and Afghanistan and four Bronze Stars, he has “a high degree of respect within the SOF community,” a former head of Special Operations Command told me. During three terms as a Florida congressman, he was more than a MAGA mouthpiece, working across the aisle on some issues.

But as national security adviser, Waltz will have a vastly greater challenge. This job involves coordinating the immense overt and covert powers of the U.S. government — the “interagency” — to frame and achieve our foreign policy goals. . . . . Let’s hope Waltz is a fast learner, with a good staff.

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s choice for CIA director, won’t arrive with a meat cleaver, either. He was deferential to Trump when he served as director of national intelligence in 2020, but he didn’t undermine the 18 agencies he supervised. Ratcliffe’s biggest problem will be stemming a rush to the exits of senior CIA officers who are telling colleagues they can’t stomach four more years of serving Trump — and sustaining liaison relationships with foreign intelligence partners who are wondering whether America is a trustworthy ally.

Gabbard is a bizarre choice for DNI. This ought to be a job for an intelligence professional with enough experience to review the budgets and priorities of an intelligence community that, frankly, is too big and barely manageable. At a minimum, you’d expect any prospective DNI to have a record of standing firm against America’s adversaries.

Not Gabbard. She visited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2017, said she was “skeptical” of the deeply documented evidence that Assad used chemical weapons on his people, and later claimed it was an “undeniable fact” that America funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine, even though critics said she was parroting Kremlin propaganda.

Trump doesn’t want war — except, perhaps, when it comes to China and Iran. Most of his appointees, the good, bad and ugly, have hawkish views about Beijing and Tehran. Those countries are in the firing line. But tragically, so are U.S. military and intelligence officers. That can’t be what voters wanted on Nov. 5. It’s up to the Senate to prevent it by denying confirmation of Hegseth and Gabbard.

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Trump's Unqualified - and Frightening - Cabinet Picks

Donald Trump is quickly rolling out his cabinet nominees and some of the picks show that competence, sanity and ethical conduct are not requirements to win Trump's nod.  Instead, total loyalty to Trump and a desire to wreak revenge on those they deem to have offended or mistreated them.  Pete Hegseth, nominee for secretary of defense, wants to bring the culture wars to the U.S. military and has a low opinion of women in the military.  Matt Gaetz, the nominee for attorney general, borders on the ridiculous, especially as Gaetz remains under ethics probes and stories of possible sex-trafficking's of under age girls (Gaetz abruptly resigned from his House seat late yesterday, effectively ending the House ethics investigation that was to release its report on Friday). Tulsi Gabbard, the nominee for director of national intelligence, is in my opinion just plain crazy on top of the fact that she has no intelligence experience.   A piece at The Atlantic looks at these questionable nominations which may be Trump testing to see whether Senate Republicans will totally debase themselves for him.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump spent much of the 2024 presidential campaign promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies and upend the federal government. Three Cabinet picks in the past two days are starting to show what that might look like.

Since last night, Trump has announced plans to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for attorney general. On the face of it, the trio seem to possess little in common except having scant qualification on paper for the jobs he wants them to fill. (Gabbard and Gaetz are also widely disliked by members of the respective parties in which they served in the U.S. House.) . . .  today, none of them share an ideology: Hegseth is a culture warrior, Gaetz a libertine with an unusual mix of political views, and Gabbard an ostensible dove with her own strange commitments.

What brings them together is not just fidelity to Trump, but a shared sense of having been persecuted by the departments they’ve been nominated to lead. It’s what they share with Trump as well as one another, and it’s their main credential to serve under him.

After the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Hegseth defended the rioters on Fox News. “ . . . Two weeks later, the National Guard said it had removed 12 members from duty on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration because of worries about extremist groups. . . . By his own account, Hegseth was one of the dozen. He said a tattoo of a Jerusalem cross had gotten him flagged. He soon left the military, then wrote a book attacking the military as a bastion of “wokeness” and decay. . . . including suggesting that General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in his role only because he is Black.

Gabbard seems like an odd choice for DNI, a role created after 9/11 to try to solve problems of siloed information between intelligence agencies. Though a veteran and former representative, she has no clear interest in intelligence and did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee. She does, however, have a grudge against the intelligence community. She says that this summer, she was placed on a watch list for domestic terrorism, resulting in frequent extra screening at airports. . . . . Confirming any of this is impossible, because the watch lists really are a civil-liberties nightmare: They are not public, the reasons anyone gets on them are opaque, and the process for challenging them is enigmatic.

Gaetz is somehow an even more improbable pick to be the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer than Gabbard is for DNI. He has extensive experience with law enforcement, but generally he’s been the suspect. In 2008, he was pulled over for speeding and suspected of driving drunk, but he refused a Breathalyzer test and charges were dropped. Court papers have alleged that Gaetz attended drug- and sex-fueled parties involving underage girls, which Gaetz denies. He’s currently being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for a variety of alleged offenses.

More to the point, Gaetz was also the subject of a lengthy Justice Department probe into possible sex-trafficking. A top Trump aide told the House January 6 committee that Gaetz had sought a pardon from Trump at the close of his first presidency. After years of investigation, the DOJ informed Gaetz’s lawyers in 2023 that he would not be charged. The experience left Gaetz furious at the Justice Department.

What each of these appointments would offer, if the nominees are confirmed, is a chance to get their revenge on the people they feel have done them wrong. Whether they can get confirmed will be a good test of just how acquiescent the GOP Senate, under incoming Majority Leader John Thune, will be to Trump’s agenda.

Hegseth would be the least traditionally qualified nominee to lead the Defense Department in memory; it’s a sprawling bureaucracy, and he has no experience with it except as a low-ranking officer.

Gabbard’s past record of criticizing Republicans may raise some eyebrows, though she has become a loyal member of Trump’s inner circle. Gaetz will be the biggest test, in part because many Republicans personally despise him, and because the probes into him make him radioactive. (Perhaps these nominees are why Trump has so avidly demanded recess-appointment power.)

If Trump can get Hegseth, Gabbard, and Gaetz confirmed, he’ll be on the way to the retribution he promised. And if any of them falls, he’s still made his intentions crystal clear.