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A Day of American Infamy

I am dating myself, but Harry Truman was still president the year I was born.  I have lived through the tumult of the 1960's, the disaster of the Vietnam War, the supposed "morning in America" under Reagan (who wittingly or not did much to set the stage for the emergence of white Christian nationalism and the huge wealth disparities that now plague the nation), and the fiasco of the Iraq War.  Through all of that I have never been as ashamed of being an American as I am today after the Felon in true crime boss manner sought to not only shake down Ukraine but basically sought to end the world order that has existed since the end of WWII and protected a fragile peace. The Pax Americana is dead.  Meanwhile, the Felon's regime is ending enforcement of civil rights at home and Home Land Security is free to conduct surveillance against LGBT groups and individuals based solely on sexual orientation. So far the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have pledge to continue to support Ukraine even as America becomes Putin's client state and jettison's its past alliances. One has to wonder what Putin has on the Felon, but whatever it is, it must be devastating.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at yesterday, a day of American infamy.  Here are excerpts: 

In August 1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the world’s leading democratic powers on “common principles” for a postwar world.

Among its key points: “no aggrandizement, territorial or other”; “sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them”; “freedom from fear and want”; freedom of the seas; “access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.”

The charter, and the alliance that came of it, is a high point of American statesmanship. On Friday in the Oval Office, the world witnessed the opposite. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s embattled democratic leader, came to Washington prepared to sign away anything he could offer President Trump except his nation’s freedom, security and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the White House.

If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy.

Where do we go from here?

If there’s one silver lining to this fiasco, it’s that Zelensky did not sign the agreement on Ukrainian minerals that was forced on him this month by Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary who’s the Tom Hagen character in this protection-racket administration. The United States is entitled to some kind of reward for helping Ukraine defend itself — and Ukraine’s destruction of much of Russia’s military might should top the list, followed by the innovation Ukraine demonstrated in pioneering revolutionary forms of low-cost drone warfare, which the Pentagon will be keen to emulate.

But if it’s a financial payback that the Trump administration seeks, the best place to get it is to seize, in collaboration with our European partners, Russia’s frozen assets and put them into an account by which Ukraine could pay for American-made arms. If the United States won’t do this, the Europeans should: Let the Ukrainians rely for their arms on Dassault, Saab, Rheinmetall, BAE Systems and other European defense contractors and see how that goes over with the “America First”-ers. Hopefully that could serve as another spur to Europeans to invest, as quickly and heavily as they can, in their depleted militaries, not simply to strengthen NATO but also to hedge against its end.

There is a second opportunity: While Trump’s abuse of Zelensky might delight the MAGA crowd, it isn’t likely to play well with most voters, including the almost 30 percent of Republicans who, even now, believe it’s in our interest to stand with Ukraine. And while most Americans may want to see the war in Ukraine end, they almost surely don’t want to see it end on Vladimir Putin’s terms.

Nor should the Trump administration. A Russian victory in Ukraine, including a cease-fire that allows Moscow to consolidate its gains and recoup its strength before the next assault, will have precisely the same effect as the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan: emboldening American enemies to behave more aggressively. Notice that, as Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Ukraine in recent weeks, Taiwan reported a surge in Chinese military drills around the island, while Chinese warships held live-fire exercises off the coast of Vietnam and came within 150 nautical miles of Sydney.

[T]his should be an opportunity for Democrats. Joe Biden was right when he called this a “decisive decade” for the future of the free world; he just happened to be too feeble and cautious a messenger.

But there are tough-minded Democrats with military and security backgrounds — Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan come to mind — who can restore the spirit of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy to the Democratic Party. It’s a message of toughness and freedom they might also be able to sell to at least some Trump voters, who cast their ballots in November for the sake of a better America, not a greater Russia.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Friday was a dreadful day — dreadful for Ukraine, for the free world, for the legacy of an America that once stood for the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

Roosevelt and Reagan must be spinning in their graves, as are Churchill and Thatcher. It’s up to the rest of us to reclaim America’s honor from the gangsters who besmirched it in the White House.

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Europe: Is the Force Awakening?

With the Felon back in the White House, America once again has the most morally repulsive and disloyal individual in the nation's history at the center of power. Both his businesses and his second regime resemble a crime family with no allegiance to anything other than self-promotion, self-enrichment, and the intimidation of others.  His cabinet is filled with those who have little expertise and experience in the agencies they now oversee and who share one common attribute: they have sworn fealty to the Felon and are ready, willing and able to fleece taxpayers and assist the Felon's campaign of retribution.  Fortunately, Europe seems to be waking up - belatedly - to the reality that under the Felon, America cannot be trusted and that the safest and wisest course is to be prepared to collectively go it alone.  Enforcing this reality are the Felon's threatened tariffs and the Felon's fealty to Vladimir Putin, a man equally morally bankrupt as the Felon himself.  A piece by a Nobel Prize winning economist looks at the possibility that Europe will rise to fill the void being left by an unfaithful and untrustworthy America.  Here are article highlights:

Since taking power five weeks ago (it seems like longer), Elon Musk and Donald Trump have wreaked havoc on multiple fronts — among other things, rapidly destroying U.S. influence in the world. America has suddenly redefined itself as a rogue nation that doesn’t honor its promises, threatens its allies, tries to engage in Mafia-style extortion, and intervenes in democratic nations’ elections.

Trump has a long history of claiming that other countries are laughing at America’s expense. . . . . But the Musk/Trump betrayal of America’s international principles is having an unintended result: Europe’s democracies, which as a group remain one of the world’s economic superpowers, are rousing themselves to fill the vacuum.

Consider what has happened in Germany recently. Back in December de facto co-president Musk endorsed the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, saying that “only the AfD can save Germany,” and has tried to use his control of X to boost the party’s support. JD Vance met with the AfD’s leader and attacked other German parties for the “firewall” that has kept the AfD out of power.

All of this backfired. While the AfD did get 21 percent of Germany’s recent vote, centrist parties will definitely form a governing coalition without it. The interventions of Musk and JD Vance have in fact strengthened Germany’s firewall against neo-Nazis.

Even before the election results were fully in, Friedrich Merz, the soon-to-be Chancellor, effectively declared that Europe is finished with American leadership:

My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA. I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump's statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.

This is a watershed moment. We may someday look back at the past few weeks as the moment Vladimir Putin lost his chance to conquer Ukraine.

Despite Trump’s lies, the truth is that Europe has done more to support Ukraine’s fight for survival than the U.S. has. Yet in their drive to undermine American support for Ukraine, the Putin-loving American Right claims the opposite.

During his press conference with Macron, Trump tried to minimize Europe’s role, claiming that Europe was simply lending money to Ukraine rather than giving aid. Macron corrected him.

But Europe could do far more. The continent’s economic performance may have been disappointing in recent years, but it remains immensely rich.

Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy, each by itself, has greater economic resources than Russia does. Collectively, they have vastly greater weight than Russia. Moreover, the war has placed the Russian economy under severe strain. Yet, for most of Europe, the cost of aiding Ukraine has been barely noticeable. And if Merz’s remarks are any indication, Europe may soon be prepared to do considerably more.

Three years on, while some of Europe’s weakness on the weapons front remains, the calculus has changed considerably. While I don’t pretend to be a military expert, I listen to people who are. According to the military experts, Russia’s initial overwhelming military advantage has been greatly eroded, for at least two reasons.

First, Russia entered this war with what appeared to be huge stocks of sophisticated military equipment. Hardly any of that original arsenal is left, and Russian industry can’t make up for the losses.

Second, war in the 2020s has turned out to be very different from the kind of war that the Russians or, as far as I can tell, many strategists expected. There have been no blitzkriegs — deep penetrations by armored columns, with air power clearing the way. Instead, cheap weapons — first shoulder-fired missiles, now swarms of drones — keep turning expensive hardware into scrap. So the Russia-Ukraine War is a war of attrition, of at best slow advances achieved at enormous cost.

So stepped-up European aid can provide Ukraine with the resources it needs to hold on against an increasingly exhausted Russia.

To be fair, some of the military experts I talk to worry that Ukraine still needs some sophisticated weapons, like Patriot missiles, that only America can provide. Yet, if Merz’s remarks are an indication of where Europe is heading, Trump may have missed his window for betraying Ukraine and delivering it to the Russians.

On economics, where I do have some independent expertise, there appears to be a real possibility that the Musk/Trump Administration will use its “reciprocal tariffs” doctrine to start a trade war with the European Union. This won’t be because Europe imposes high tariffs on U.S. products — it doesn’t. It will be because some Trump advisers have decided to ignore basic economics and claim that European value-added taxes are protectionist.

If Musk/Trump does go that route, they will be in for a shock: Europe can effectively retaliate. The European Union is a customs union, with a unified trade policy and common tariff levels.

A trade war with Europe means going head to head with an economy more or less the same size as our own, at the same time that we’re having fights with all our other trading partners. And the Europeans are not going to be in a conciliatory mood. Did I mention that Tesla sales in Europe fell 45 percent last month?

It’s terrible watching the United States degenerate into Putin-loving thuggery. But there may be some compensation: our degradation encourages the remaining good guys to step up to the plate.

People at the European Commission sometimes joke that there should be a statue of Joseph Stalin in front of the Berlaymont, the building in Brussels where the commission is headquartered. Why? Because the threat from Stalin arguably made the European Union possible.

If Europe rises to the occasion now, maybe they should also put up a statue of Donald Trump.

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Jeff Bezos and the Destruction of the Washington Post

If one studies how Hitler and the Nazi regime came to control news outlets and shut down independent media outlets, in addition to threats and intimidation, newspapers and journals had their office attacked and ransacked as a means of silencing them.  Now, as we see America sliding towards oligarchy or even dictatorship, similar threats are being made against news outlets, individual journalists, but we are also seeing the billionaire owners of newspapers and television channels voluntarily firing journalists, revamping editorial boards and seeking to silence critics of the fascist regime of the Felon.  Leading the way in this disturbing phenomenon is the Washington Post owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. Back in the fall, Bezos killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris, then he killed a political cartoon making fun of those like himself who had groveled and kissed the Felon's ring - much like the anchors of Morning Joe did after the election (I ceased listening to the show).  Now, Bezos is further silencing the Post's editorial page to allegedly to better support "personal liberties" and "free markets." The former is laughable as the Felon's regime seeks to erase transgender Americans and now his Department of Homeland Security is going to conduct surveillance of LGBT groups and individuals.  Apparently, personal liberties only matter if they apply to the super wealthy and white, heterosexual "Christians."  The irony is that a lesson from Germany in the 1930's teach us that by voluntarily censor oneself is no guaranty that down the road the regime will not eventually come for you. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the troubling trend:

The thing about American newspaper opinion sections is this: Their owners get final say. If the man who signs the checks—it’s almost always a man—really wants to see his cocker spaniel run City Hall, you’ll probably see Our Choice: Fluffernutter for Mayor atop the editorial page. For generations, this has been one of the overriding perks of media ownership. If Jeff Bezos wanted to turn The Washington Post’s opinion section over to an AI-powered version of Alexa, he’d be within his rights. So his announcement this morning—that Post Opinions would henceforth reorient “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”—is, in a sense, nothing astonishing.

But the scale of the hypocrisy on display here is eye-watering, and this decision can only make the Post a weaker institution.

Let’s get the motivation out of the way. This is the same Jeff Bezos who decided to cancel the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election—a move that led more than 250,000 paying Post readers to cancel their subscriptions within days. The same Bezos who flew to Mar-a-Lago to cozy up to Donald Trump after the election. The same Bezos whose Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and paid $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary—the most it had ever paid for a doc, nearly three times what any other studio offered, and more than 70 percent of which will go directly into Trump’s pockets. All of that cash seems to have served as a sort of personal seat license for Bezos, earning him a spot right behind the president at the inauguration. The tech aristocracy’s rightward turn is by now a familiar theme of the postelection period, and it doesn’t take much brain power to see today’s announcement as part of the same shift.

But Bezos’s assertion of power is downright laughable compared with the rhetoric he was using just four months ago when trying to justify his killing of the Harris endorsement. His core argument back then was that the worst thing a newspaper’s opinion section could do is appear to be taking one side politically.

So the solution is to have the owner spend months shipping millions off to Trump HQ? And then declare that certain opinions will now be verboten in the Post’s pages? “Viewpoints opposing [the two] pillars will be left to be published by others,” he stated this morning.

A few months ago, Bezos was confident that the Post had to differentiate itself from the swarm of misleading online content by being staunchly independent of any ideological agenda. “Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice,” he wrote in October. But today, the existence of all that internet muck is positioned as a perfect excuse to abandon any desire for a broad-based opinion section.

So, to recap: A newspaper can’t be seen as taking a side. Until it’s essential that it be seen as taking a side. Bezos would never use his own ideological beliefs to restrict the Post’s work. Until he decides that he must use his own ideological beliefs to restrict the Post’s work.

As was the case in the fall, the problem with these swings is less their content than their naked service to one man’s agenda. A newspaper is free to endorse or not endorse whomever it wants. An owner is free to shape his opinion section to his will. But the realpolitik context of those decisions clashes wildly with Bezos’s lecturing tone and political analysis. I doubt that today’s announcement will generate another 250,000 subscription cancellations, if only because there are so many fewer subscribers left to cancel. But the impact will be felt.

Only three months ago, the Post was prepping a plan to “win back” wayward subscribers by focusing on the paper’s star reporters and columnists. Many have already jumped ship; how are the remaining ones supposed to fit into the new no-critiquing-the-genius-of-unrestrained-markets regime?

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Trump's Frightening and Telling Embrace of Putin

We may never know if Donald Trump, a/k/a the Felon, is actually a Russian asset as some former KGB officials are claiming, or instead using his office to run an international protection racket to shake down former allies as he cuddles up to Vladimir Putin.  Whatever the real story, the Felon is upending treaties with America's allies and embracing totalitarian regimes that generations of Americans have seen as adversaries to be resisted, not coddled and legitimized. Former allies are being sent a message that America is not trustworthy and that flattery - a likely bribes and payoffs behind the scenes -  of the felon means more than generations old alliances.  I know my Republican ancestors would be utterly appalled with what the Republican Party remade in the image of the Felon has become.  A long column in the New York Times looks at the current circumstances that ought to enrage true American patriots and what a president loyal to American values and past endeavors should do with Putin and the war in Ukraine.  Here are column highlights:

The drama going on between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine raises one of the most disturbing questions I’ve ever had to ask about my own country: Are we being led by a dupe for Vladimir Putin — by someone ready to swallow whole the Russian president’s warped view of who started the war in Ukraine and how it must end? Or are we being led by a Mafia godfather, looking to carve up territory with Russia the way the heads of crime families operate? “I’ll take Greenland, and you can take Crimea. I’ll take Panama, and you can have the oil in the Arctic. And we’ll split the rare earths of Ukraine. It’s only fair.”

Either way, my fellow Americans and our friends abroad, for the next four years at least, the America you knew is over. The bedrock values, allies and truths America could always be counted upon to defend are now all in doubt — or for sale. Trump is not just thinking out of the box. He is thinking without a box, without any fidelity to truth or norms that animated America in the past.

I can’t blame our traditional friends for being disoriented. Read the sorrowful essay last week by the heroic Soviet dissident and freedom fighter Natan Sharansky:

“When I first heard President Donald Trump’s words on the tarmac — when he blamed Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for starting the war that Russia launched against Ukraine — I was absolutely shocked,” Sharansky wrote for The Free Press. “Trump seems to have adopted the rhetoric of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. He repeated a line from the Kremlin that sounded like Soviet-style propaganda: that Zelensky is not a legitimate leader. When Putin, the seemingly eternal leader of Russia, says it, it is laughable. When the president of the United States says it, it’s alarming, tragic, and does not comply with common sense.”

That’s a benign interpretation of Trump — that he is just besotted with Putin, Russia’s Christian nationalist, anti-woke crusader, and not applying the common sense that he promised. But then there is also another explanation: Trump does not see American power as the cavalry coming to rescue the weak seeking freedom from those out to quash them; he sees America as coming to shake down the weak. He’s running a protection racket.

Consider this stunning paragraph from a Wall Street Journal article about Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s recent meeting in Kyiv with Zelensky. Bessent presented Zelensky with an offer he couldn’t refuse — to sign over Ukrainian mineral rights to America, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, to compensate for U.S. aid.

It was a scene right out of “The Godfather”: “Bessent pushed the paper across the table, demanding that Zelensky sign it …. Zelensky took a quick look and said he would discuss it with his team. Bessent then pushed the paper closer to Zelensky. ‘You really need to sign this,’ the Treasury secretary said. Zelensky said he was told ‘people back in Washington’ would be very upset if he didn’t. The Ukrainian leader said he took the document but didn’t commit to signing.”

This whole story shows you again what happens when Trump is no longer surrounded by buffers but only by amplifiers. Bessent, a savvy investor, surely knew that the president of Ukraine could not just sign a piece of paper turning over hundreds of billions in mineral rights without checking with his lawyers, his Parliament or his people. But the Treasury secretary felt he had to do Trump’s bidding, no matter how foul or absurd. If the president wants to empty Gaza and make it a casino, then that’s what you sell. Extort Ukraine in the middle of war? That’s what you do.

A serious U.S. president would recognize that Putin is playing a very weak hand that we should exploit. As The Economist noted last week, most of Russia’s “gains were in the first weeks of the war. In April 2022, following Russia’s retreat from the north of Ukraine, it controlled 19.6 percent of Ukrainian territory; its casualties (dead and wounded) were perhaps 20,000. Today Russia occupies 19.2 percent and its casualties are 800,000, reckon British sources. . . . By April, Russia may run out of its T-80 tanks. Last year it lost twice as many artillery systems as in the preceding two years. … The reallocation of resources from productive sectors to the military complex has fueled double-digit inflation. Interest rates are 21 percent.”

If this were poker, Putin is holding a pair of twos and bluffing by going all in. Trump, instead of calling Putin’s bluff, is saying, “I think I’ll fold.”

Instead of rallying all our European allies, doubling down on the military pressure on Putin and making the Russian leader “an offer he can’t refuse,” Trump did just the opposite. He divided us from our allies at the U.N. by refusing to join them in a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine — voting with the likes of North Korea — and began a lie-filled campaign to delegitimize Zelensky, not Putin.

Besides falsely claiming that Ukraine started the war, Trump declared that Zelensky’s popularity rating is 4 percent (his popularity rating is 57 percent, 13 points higher than Trump’s) and that Zelensky is a “dictator” and should submit to an election. Meanwhile, he gave Putin — who sentenced his biggest rival for the presidency, Alexei Navalny, to a total of 28 years in an Arctic hellhole, where he mysteriously died — a total free pass.

Trump is demanding three times or four times the roughly $120 billion the United States has given Ukraine in military, humanitarian and other financial aid — aid Ukrainians used to fight to protect the West from the Russian aggressor.

The whole thing is just shameful. Trump, in effect, is looking to make a profit off Ukrainians as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine while making no demand on Putin for reparations or promising any future U.S. protection for Kyiv.

I have no problem with America asking for preferred access for our companies to investments in Ukraine’s natural resources after the war, as a thank-you for our aid. But doing it now, and with no security guarantees in return? Don Corleone would be embarrassed to ask for that. But not Don Trump.

Trump completely misreads Putin. He thinks Putin just needs a little positive attention, a little understanding, a little concern for his security needs — a hug! — and he will sign the peace Trump so badly desires. Nonsense. . . . . Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War,” remarked to me: Putin is not looking for “peace in Ukraine. He is looking for victory in Ukraine" — because without a victory, “he is very vulnerable at home. Capitalist democracies will do anything for peace, and Putin’s autocracy will do anything for victory. We need to switch that around.”

The way to do that, Aron added, would be by signaling to Putin that the Western allies will see his bet and raise him one — “not maligning a heroic nation” that has been fighting to preserve a Europe whole and free.

We should back the Ukrainians to get the best deal they can. It will most likely have to include a cease-fire in place, so that Putin’s de facto control of parts of eastern Ukraine is acknowledged; a moratorium on Ukrainian membership in NATO; and a lifting of Western sanctions on Russia, but only once Russia demobilizes its offensive army from Ukrainian soil. In return, Putin will have to accept European peacekeeping troops in, and a no-fly-zone over, a free and sovereign Ukraine, backstopped by the United States to guarantee that Putin’s army cannot return, plus Russian noninterference in Ukraine’s process of entering the European Union.

It is critical that the United States insist Ukraine be allowed to enter the European Union — a negotiating process that Kyiv is in the midst of right now. I want Russians to look over at Ukraine every day and see a prosperous, Slavic, free-market democracy and ask themselves why they are living in Putin’s Slavic thieving autocracy. In my view, this whole war has never been about Putin keeping Ukraine out of NATO. It is Ukraine in the E.U. that Putin really fears.

A Russian international affairs scholar, who can speak only privately, remarked to me from Moscow that Putin’s team sees Trump’s team as a clown car, full of amateurs — easy pickings for the savvy and cynical Putin’s ultimate goal: “MRGA — Make Russia Great Again (and Make America Less Great Again).” Putin’s long-term goal, he added, is to manage the decline of U.S. hegemony so that America is “just one of the peer great powers,” focused on the Western Hemisphere and withdrawn militarily from Europe and Asia. Putin sees Trump as his blunt instrument “to manage that inevitable decline.”

Will Trump and his G.O.P. bobbleheads ever wake up to that? Maybe — when it’s too late.

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GOP Blindness: It’s the Health Care, Stupid

The Felon and Elon Musk continue to spread chaos throughout the federal government and congressional Republicans are seeing increased constituent rage over both the misnamed DOGE and the firing of federal employees across the country, yet so far these Republican cowards in the House of Representatives are putting fealty to the Felon over the lives and wellbeing of their constituents.  They seemingly put fears of primary challenges over worries of voter revolts against them at the pools.  One of several flash points is the Republican proposals to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security in order to fund massive tax cuts for the super wealthy and large corporations, many of which already pay less in taxes than average families. Cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security would impact many throughout the MAGA base, but Medicaid cuts could be the biggest flash point because working class whites in red states are the largest group of recipients of Medicaid benefits.  Moreover, in many rural - and Republican - areas Medicaid payments are the life support for rural hospitals which are both the largest local employers and key to access to medical care.  A piece in Politico looks at GOP blindness to the powder keg they may be igniting on themselves.  Here are article excerpts:

With several GOP lawmakers getting roasted at town halls this past week, there’s already a lot of speculation about how Elon Musk’s Project Chainsaw — er, Department of Government Efficiency — could be the beginning of the end for the GOP’s congressional majorities.

There’s obvious parallels to the beginnings of the 2010 Republican romp or, eight years later, the public uproar that preceded the “blue wave” that swept the GOP from power in the House. . . . the DOGE-fueled protests we saw this week aren’t directly comparable. At least not yet — and I think they’re right.

Another Republican priority is making them far more nervous. Consider what was at the center of both the 2010 and 2018 House landslides — the creation and attempted repeal, respectively, of the Affordable Care Act, the biggest overhaul of American health care in a generation.

Now consider what Republicans will begin voting on in the House this week: a vast domestic policy agenda that could include huge cuts to Medicaid, a cornerstone of the nation’s health care safety net, to the tune of more than $800 billion over the coming decade.

Two of those vulnerable GOP lawmakers I spoke to over the weekend were ready to brush off the anti-Musk backlash. . . . . . For both, however, Medicaid is a different story.

“That’s where the battle’s coming,” said Gonzales. “There’s no doubt that there’s waste, fraud and abuse in every program in the government, including Medicaid — but at what point do you stop cutting into the fat and start cutting into the bone? You can’t pull the rug out from millions of people.”

Gonzales, who has a large constituency enrolled in the program, already co-authored a letter with seven other House Republicans representing large Hispanic populations asking Johnson to rethink where the GOP is headed on Medicaid. And he said he plans to personally confront the speaker about the issue at a scheduled meeting tonight.

The recent history of grassroots political movements is instructive here: Major political reckonings are often triggered by Americans who are fearful of losing what they once had.

In 2010, it was conservatives and moderates who worried that Democrats were trying to radically remake the health care system, jeopardizing their own private coverage and increasing the government’s role in health care. Then it was the millions of low- and middle-income Americans who pushed back on GOP attempts to claw back those new federal subsidies and undo the ACA’s very popular protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

This time, the GOP’s bet seems to be that the public equates Medicaid with welfare — a program that largely benefits the poor and undeserving.  . . . .What they are papering over is just how much the program has been transformed over the past decade: The ACA greatly expanded its enrollment in most states beyond the truly indigent, and many seniors rely on it for nursing and other high-intensity care. The program also includes a program for safety-net hospitals that, if touched, could blow a hole in private health care systems’ budgets.

Trump, notably, seems to have an intuitive sense of the distinction here. He has shown no sign yet of flinching on DOGE — in fact, he argued this weekend Musk should be “MORE AGGRESSIVE” in slashing away. And yet on Medicaid, he has said many times, publicly and privately, that he’s not interested in making cuts.

Still, his party is forging ahead: Johnson wants his members to vote as soon as tomorrow on a fiscal blueprint that orders at least $880 billion worth of cuts from the House Energy and Commerce Committee — reductions that the panel will largely find only in Medicaid. Without those cuts, not only does Johnson lose the right wing, the math doesn’t work for the rest of the GOP agenda, including a planned permanent extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

It’s not just the swing-district Republicans who are sweating. Steve Bannon, the godfather of the MAGA movement himself, argued Thursday on the War Room podcast that Medicaid cuts would hurt working-class members of Trump’s own coalition. He added: “Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.”

Even Trump allies who roll their eyes at Bannon agree with his assessment. One longtime Trump confidant told me yesterday that tons of seniors who backed Trump rely on Medicaid, not just Medicare. Those are the types of voters who show up at town halls and inundate offices with phone calls if their benefits are threatened. “It’s not just working people or the inner-city kids” from blue areas, the person said . . .

Meanwhile, Democrats are salivating at the prospect of another GOP misstep on health care. Under pressure from their base to put up a fight, they’ve privately worried that protesting the DOGE cuts isn’t necessarily great political messaging. There are no such worries about health care.

They’re already pumping millions of dollars into Medicaid-related ads around the country.

Republicans might be convinced that the anti-DOGE protests won’t amount to much — even the reddest of congressional districts has Democrats who will show up at a town hall and make a scene, after all. And what we’ve seen so far falls short of what I saw covering the backlash to the GOP’s 2017 ACA repeal attempts, which spurred vicious eruptions from across the political spectrum.

But those who are watching what is now developing on the ground — and what Republicans on Capitol Hill are now considering — have a message about what’s coming: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

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Project 2025, the Felon, and the Great Resegregation

If one wades through the 900 pages of Project 2025 it quickly becomes apparent that the document and the agenda it pushes is one of white supremacy and special privilege for evangelicals and other wrongly labeled "conservative Christians" -  both groups that are decidedly not Christian when measured by Christ's gospel message. Selectively cherry picking Old Testament passages to condemn others and establishing "Christian academies" to avoid desegregation do not make one Christian.  In June 2016, the Felon met with leading evangelicals and promised them political power and dispensation for non-discrimination laws if they supported him.  In their thirst for power these false Christians threw past feigned morality out the window and embraced the Felon. Now, back in office, the Felon is striving to make good on his promise and is seeking to undo the gains of the Civil Rights movement and grant special privileges to whites - especially white males - and targeting those who fail to conform to Christofascist dogma.  All of this is being done under the false claim of furthering a color blind meritocracy whereas in reality the exact opposite is the goal. White males are deemed automatically competent, qualified, and superior to anyone  who is nonwhite and/or not heterosexual.  A long piece in The Atlantic  looks at the insidious agenda to take the nation back in time to the 1950's.  Here are highlights:

The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer.

In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”

Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms. During her confirmation hearing, Trump’s education-secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, said she did not know if schools could lose funding for teaching Black-history classes under the order.

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. . . . . they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color.

The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. . . . . some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.

As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This analysis is perceptive in the sense that the exact reverse is true . . . . and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like Beattie.

In 2020, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell published a book arguing that. . . . . Because of the Civil Rights Act, white people had fallen “asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Caldwell’s assessment has grown in popularity among prominent conservatives. The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has described the Civil Rights Act as having “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon,” . . . . On his social network, X, the South African–born Musk, who is playing a key role in the Trump administration, regularly promotes scientific racism, the pseudoscientific ideology that holds that race determines individual potential.

The problem conservatives trying to undermine anti-discrimination law seem to have with an “official hierarchy of races” is not that one exists but that, in their warped conception, white people are not on top, as they should be.

The contention, overt or implied, is always that unlike white men, whose competence can be assumed, the non-white people with desirable jobs are undeserving. The irony, of course, is that many of the white men making these assumptions are themselves unqualified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is best-known for being a reality-television star.

Even so, the Great Resegregation seeks not a return to the explicit racial separation of Jim Crow, but rather an embrace of ostensibly “color-blind” policies intended to sustain a de facto segregation that is more durable and less overt, one in which Black access to the middle and elite strata of American life will be ever more rare and fleeting. The numbers of Black doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, showrunners, and generals would no longer rise. . . . . Most Black people would be confined to, as Trump memorably put it, the menial “Black jobs” they were meant for, save for those willing to sustain the self-serving fiction that they are among the good ones.

The demolition of multiracial democracy began a dozen years ago, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rolled back voting-rights protections adopted in the 1960s to enforce the rights enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment. Those protections made America, for the first time, a democracy for all its citizens.

The Roberts Court has steadily eroded those protections, insisting that they are no longer necessary, even as racist ideas once considered beyond the pale return to the mainstream. These changes have had the predictable outcome of increasing racial disparities in voting.

The Roberts Court has treated policies meant to rectify racial discrimination as themselves racist. The Court shut down what remained of public-school integration efforts. It overturned affirmative action in higher education. These decisions have eroded diversity in the classroom. But they’re just the beginning for the resegregators, who intend to ensure that America’s traditional racial hierarchies are persistent and stable.

Instead of individual meritocracy, they seem to be advocating a racial meritocracy, in which the merit of an individual hire or admission can be assessed not by their individual accomplishments but by how well the group they are associated with fits a particular role. In this way, the Great Resegregation seeks firmer moral ground than the racial apartheid of the past. Racial disparities can be framed not as the result of discrimination, but as a fact: that white people are just better and more qualified.

Notably, Trump officials are not willing to state their aims explicitly; they feel obligated to pay lip service to ideals of color-blind meritocracy and mislead about their intentions. . . . . Trumpists seek to not just repeal protections against discrimination, but reverse the “diversity ethos” that has enabled America’s tenuous strides toward equality.

And that progress is not only fragile but remarkably incomplete. Neither schools nor workplaces have ever been particularly integrated.  . . . . Occupational segregation has remained stagnant since the ’90s. Black workers with or without college degrees are concentrated in professions that pay less than those of their white counterparts, despite a rise in Black people obtaining college degrees.

There are perhaps two exceptions. One is the federal government, where until now, anti-discrimination laws have been strictly enforced. Trump’s cronies have tried to discredit the federal workforce precisely because it is often more meritocratic, and therefore more integrated than the private sector. . . . . That is why Trumpists are so focused on “ending DEI” in the federal workforce. They see anti-discrimination and inclusion as a ladder of upward mobility for people they do not believe should have one.

The second place where America has grown more integrated is media and entertainment, arenas highly visible to the public. This has depreciated the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “psychological wage” of white racial identity—making those who once held an unquestioned hegemony over American culture feel like something has been stolen from them. And this shift helped fuel the nationwide backlash to diversity efforts that Trump rode to office.

An integrated cast, writers’ room, or development team is deemed “woke,” by which critics simply mean integrated, and therefore suspect. A woman, LGBTQ person, or person of color in a leading role is deemed unqualified, or worthy of rejection just because of who they are. What may seem like silly internet controversies are in fact demands for a resegregation of creative workplaces.

Asked to provide a real example of lowered standards in the military during his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was unable to. The U.S. military has long led the way in demonstrating how a diverse workforce yields American excellence—one reason some conservatives are fixated on its relative egalitarianism, which they deride as “wokeness.” . . . Of course he himself is an illustration of lowered standards—Hegseth has no demonstrable expertise for the job he was given—but because he is a white man, his qualifications for the job are assumed, as a result of the Trumpist concept of racial meritocracy.

For all the big talk about putting an end to “social engineering,” the Great Resegregation is itself a radical attempt to socially engineer America to be poorer, whiter, less equal, and less democratic. Much as the old Jim Crow measures kept many southern white people impoverished and disenfranchised alongside the Black southerners they targeted, the Great Resegregation will leave wealthy white elites with a firmer grip on power and the working classes with fewer opportunities and a weakened social safety net. The only people left with more will be those who already had more than they needed to begin with.

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