He should resign. He should have never been confirmed. He is unqualified. đđť
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He should resign. He should have never been confirmed. He is unqualified. đđť
⌠and fascism thrives on public demonstrations of violent power against âothers.â
Oh for fuck's sake. John Roberts is the most active Republican in the country. He is more political than any elected official in America. He has inserted himself in US politics relentlessly and to the great and perhaps everlasting detriment of the country.
This.
Every one of these events is this Administration taking opportunities to claw away norms, normalize what we know is wrong & bleed America of its empathy and outrage.
This is the kind of statement that makes me despair that we can get out of this. If everyone who hears it doesn't find this delusional commentary to be disqualifying for the office of president I just don't see how we can have a functional democracy.
Please someone persuade me that Trump hasnât completely lost his mind and that we arenât hurtling deep into mad king territory.
Vance follows a coterie of online Nazis on X, has described Curtis Yarvin as a major intellectual influence, and openly attacks immigrants in blood and soil terms. The response of most of the political press? "Doesn't look like anything to me."
Way!
Thread: this is Russ Vought giving himself permission to ignore Congress and the constitution
Being lawless does not make Trump omnipotent â nor can he just snap his fingers and make all his authoritarian desires a reality. America is in an acutely dangerous situation. But obscuring those distinctions is an act of defeatism that only serves the regime.
The lies' laughable implausibility is a feature, not a bug. They're not trying to convince discerning, skeptical, fact-based people. They're trying to give supporters a fantasy that validates their feelings and creates a sort of loyalty test, while flaunting the absurdity in everyone else's faces.
Civic education and especially the press in this country aren't great, but the big problem here is that the people acting like the president isn't a public servant tasked with faithfully executing the law, but instead The Country's Boss, includes the GOP majorities in Congress and the Supreme Court.
I wrote this weeks after trump won in 2016 and almost ten years later I still think there is basically nothing more to say, not because I am super smart but because this is all so very empty and stupid www.lawfaremedia.org/article/bull...
𧾠Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.
The extent to which ICE is ignoring all civil rights and due process is astounding â and indicative of a culture where theyâve been told they can do literally no wrong. Agency and admin leaders must face sanctions and legal consequences.
"Considerable questions," "appears to be evidence"--so forceful.
At some point in the not too distant future the conventional wisdom will be that this was a period where the US focused on dumb shit while China took the lead in multiple domains
He was a mediocre officer, a racist traitor, & an absolutely terrible human being. Everyone would know this if we had finished Reconstruction & made Union Day our second-most important federal holiday: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
An underrated problem is that a lot of mainstream media is badly adapted for analyzing big structural problems with a lot of unfamiliar detail. That is why @wired.com has been killing it - it has adapted the perspective of tech journalism to the problem of technically complex political crisis.
This (whole thread) gets at what I was going for, and the point where there should be broad agreement, even as we might wrangle on details, terminology and degree of democratic collapse.
Just tried watching Ezra Kleinâs latest NYT podcast episode on how the U.S. got to this point where vaccines are so politicized. Itâs pretty clear that Klein and his guestsâDavid Wallace Wells and Rachael Bedardâreally do not understand why/how the political right turned on vaccines.
Every damn Republican needs to be hounded at every turn.
Messaging and actions that respond to the moment, collectively put forward, are called for.
âThe Biden administration was totally feckless when it came to holding the Netanyahu government to the standard of American law and the standards that we claim to apply to every other country in the world when it comes to the duty to provide humanitarian assistance.â Senator Chris Van Hollen.
This is absolutely catastrophic for U.S. higher education, and for U.S. global leadership. Just the latest in a series of senseless acts of self-sabotage by a malevolent administration bent on making the United States weak and poor.
Once again, the people you are angry at are the who control majorities in both houses of Congress, & the people everyone should be asking constant questions of are Speaker Johnson & Senate Majority Leader Thune. We have to stop invoking Murc's Law & giving these people free passes.
Impeachment began in England as a way to remove obnoxious or corrupt ministers of the king. Unlike in a democracy, there was no way to get rid of a bad king absent revolution, but you could change policy by getting rid of the counselors pursuing it.
Agree with this. Make them fight for every inch. Worth reading this thread.
This is insanity. This is the sign of a government that has lost its mind.
A reminder that, among Republicans, only Mitch McConnell voted against RFK Jr. Susan Collins voted to confirm. Lisa Murkowski voted to confirm. Former physician Bill Cassidy advanced him out of committee and voted to confirm and lied to defend him. www.senate.gov/legislative/...
When Republicans villainize a mass shooter, they are giving away their game: They are saying the shooter should never have had a gun, which Republicans made sure they could buy. Being trans doesn't shoot people, but owning an assault rifle does.
"A three-and-a-quarter-hour televised c̸a̸b̸i̸n̸e̸t̸ Politburo meeting, in which the highest-ranking government officials of the world's oldest and once-greatest democracy abased themselves ridiculously before their presidential idol. Every Trump apparatchik took a turn...adulating their leader."
Droppin off my son at college today so I only had time to do a skim plus of this piece. But I recommend it. Gets at the heart of what to do and what not do. www.elizabethspiers.com/why-dems-kee...
remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature
I am once again telling you: MAGA is a coalition of men against women. It's a coalition that spans the divides of race, religion & class. But misogyny is so pervasive in the US that most people can no more see it than they can see the air they breathe.
Today in the NYTâs further & ongoing & shameful normalization of seizing territory from our NATO allies, something that is illegal under multiple treaty commitments we have signed & ratified, & which would have immediately ended any presidency from Truman to Obama: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
This claim is 100% bull****. Either RFK Jr. actually believes this, in which case he's insane, or he doesn't and he's saying it to suck up to Trump, in which case he's an a**-kissing quisling.
I'd have no beef with that.
An honest point of view is grounded in reality.
What was it? It was the entire collected Principal Officers of the Executive Departments violating their oaths of office & their Constitutional obligation to invoke the 25th Amendment. Let's stop calling it reality TV & call it what it actually was.
đđŻ This was always the inevitable endpoint, and so we should have made other choices as a society & polity long ago about our tolerance for fancy constitutional arguments & faux historical glosses: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Pritzker showing political opposition and elite resistance. Not accepting lies as pretexts, responding to the real reason. Not weakly acquiescing, a clear no. Not letting awful/illegal things slide, warning to use all the power he has to punish it. And the fascist bully doesnât know what to do.
Remember, if you aren't part of the In-group you're part of the Out-group, and need to be destroyed.
Trump is trying to broker a peace deal with the leader and the country that wants to keep the war going. Instead of applying pressure, he offered handshakes. Itâs unworkable by design. And Ukrainians pay in blood to buy Trump time to grasp that. www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...
What you would do when authoritarianism comes to the United States is what you're doing right now
one sign that the âunitary executiveâ is less the restoration of an older constitutional order and more the imposition of a radical new one is that allowing the president to act untethered from most legal or congressional limits has largely just served to plunge the country into disorder
the Bolton raid, the ongoing NG presence in DC & planned deployment in Chicago & other cities, the plan to arm the NG, the move to rearrest Kilmar Abrego Garcia & deport him to Uganda, threatening South Korea's democratically elected government, & now the attack on the Fed what a few days it's been
A great message that would sound even better if echoed by the opposition leadership inside Congress, who would be the only ones after an election win who could remove Trump or even put up a fight in the federal government
We'll date the beginning of autocratic consolidation in the US to early July, when Congress surrendered with the budget bill & recissions & the SCOTUS end of term decisions gave Trump essentially every victory
How many people of color and women does Trump have to fire or otherwise target before the racism and systematic discrimination within his administration is condemned by anyone of power in Washington? In either party? He's so despicable. Yet it seems business as usual in the mainstream media.
The last sentence should be terrifying for everyone (L'Ătat, c'est moi) & this is well beyond Nixon-level impeachment/resignation stuff. Unprecedented levels of unpunished authoritarianism.
This is a tremendously insulting, ignorant, and consequential moment from Trump. Trump clearly has no idea what he has done. But starting w the 50+ million people in South Korea, many throughout Asia and the rest of the world are aware. Even SecState/NatSecAdvisor little Marco must know.
FUCK ME DO NOT DESCRIBE TRUMP'S PLANS IN THE HEADLINES WITHOUT NOTING THEY ARE ILLEGAL.
Have been working on an essay on this exact topic, and my guess is lots of others are thinking along the same lines.
đđŻ
Read this exceptional piece by @vermontgmg.bsky.social: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...
Watching Putin and Trump carving up Ukraine has frightening echoes of Munich 1938. This is the dangerous "peace in our time" moment. My latest. charlieangus.substack.com/p/peace-in-o...
Recognition that the MAGA-ized court majority, devoid of judicial integrity, is nothing but a band of partisan hacks should inform democracy advocatesâ agenda.
âIn Silicon Valley, far from thinking theyâre lucky, they think theyâre hard done by, theyâre victims. I couldnât, and still canât, understand this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity.â
it will take years to undo the damage from this lawless, criminal conduct. business as usual once Democrats reclaim executive power will unacceptable. no turning the page without repairing the damage
Thugs, gangsters, pieces of shit, whatever you want to call them, these people are relentlessly cruel.
The New York Times, the Washington Post and the TV networks know Trump is building a dictatorship. Itâs their duty to sound a loud and clear warning to the public. But because of their cowardice or complicity, they wonât.
That was one of the most batshit press conferences of Trump's public life. He brandished a photo of Putin and promised to deploy the US military to occupy Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. A sane country would be moving toward impeachment and removal right now.
Yes, we do.
Let The Race Begin! talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/let-t...
The Republican Party is corrupt and irreparably broken.
This is ridiculous.
A tragic preview of whatâs coming at R1 universities around the country
In November 2024, I made a list of things I thought the fascism theory of Trumpism predicted could happen.
Removing the memorial to the 49 innocent people killed in the 2016 terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub, because a rainbow is too political. Restoring Confederate monuments and renaming military bases after Confederates because, um, honoring armed treason in defense of slavery isnât political?
Your regular reminder that đşđ¸ has completely normalized levels of voter suppression & disenfranchisement that make it impossible to seriously claim we are an actual democracy
Donald Trump has found his Roy Cohn, and her name is Laura Loomer. She is 100% devoted to him and only him, and willing to do and say anything that will advance his interests. And he loves her for it, possibly more than he loves anyone else in the world. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...
There have been some very scathing dissents over the years, but I can't think of one where the accusation is so bluntly made that the majority is a bunch of partisan hacks who are politically subservient to a president.
The explosion in CEO pay relative to the pay of workers isnât because CEOs have become so much more valuable than before. They've just gamed the system to line their pockets. Is it any wonder why so many working people feel the game is rigged against them? (It is.)
What Danielle said. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the average effective tariff rate in this economy right now is 18.2% Let me put that another way. President Trump has raised taxes on American businesses and consumers by -- on average -- 18.2%
Trump is a pro-crime criminal who has gutted the crime fighting ability of law enforcement agencies, weakened our protections against foreign criminal actors, pardoned thousands of criminals including many who attacked law enforcement and is the most corrupt public official in U.S. history,
www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-a...
âHeâs soft spoken in a certain wayâ đ¤đ§đ¤ˇââď¸đ¤Śââď¸
I don't know if any civilization can survive this level of mendacity and stupidity.
There's a key asymmetry here if one wants to turn the Dems into a party of "fighters for liberal democracy." The whole point of liberal democracy is that it's a preferable alternative to a politics of fighting. For the MAGA right, dog eat dog "fighting" is just what the world is "naturally" like.
BREAKING: Putin Still Putin White House pretends Putin isn't Putin, and for some reason a lot of media goes along with that, but Putin the aggressive war criminal continues acting like an aggressive war criminal, exactly how everyone who understands and isn't lying about the situation keeps saying.
Don't. Print. Lies. In. The. Newspaper.
Absolutely right. Dem leaders shunning Mamdani, blaming the left for the problems of the party, resisting generational change, are out of touch, buying into oldthink about "moderation" that is really surrender, serves big money interests at the expense of the people & won't win/energize new voters.
One of my beliefs is there are still more good, caring people in America than there are people filled with hate. We need the good people right now.
Well worth reading: Transcript: Trump Press Secâs Fury at Media Erupts as Putin Mess Grows newrepublic.com/article/1993... via @newrepublic.com
Whatâs it going to take? I think about this every damn day
Yep. As I try to argue in this pod chat, Trump's military occupation of DC and LA, his threat to end vote-by-mail via executive order, and the corrupt Texas gerrymandering scheme are part of the same big story.
Any US security guarantees to Ukraine would not be credible if Trump is president, sorry. Right idea in theoryâRussia already broke multiple deals, already attacked aggressively twice, only US can really scare themâbut even if Europe got US to agree, it wonât be credible, and therefore cannot work.
just can not shake the feeling that democratic leadership really believes they are just a couple votes away from the halcyon times of enjoying senate softball and seersucker suit day
"So why are so many powerful institutions behaving like it isnât and they canât? If a few bratty cartoon kids can peel off the emperorâs clothes, what are the grown-ups so afraid of?" Gift article www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/a...
Trump Confesses that the United States Is a Client of Russia www.emptywheel.net/2025/08/18/t...
On point:
Itâs all madness now all day long. Escalating madness. Heâs completely lost it and is doing enormous harm to America and the world.
Maybe they should have consulted with those people who make up new drug brand names.
the irony of MAGA is that the actual result of its âgovernanceâ will be sharp national decline and humiliation
Just bow down to the foreign dictator, said the US president. Give him what he wants, reward aggression, promise you wonât seek allies to help you deter another attack, and trust that they wonât try for more later, even though they already did once before. Why wonât you agree? Thatâs no fair. To me.
Trumpâs surrender to Putin is appalling.
It's just so sad and pathetic to think that Marco Rubio of all peopleâwho long reviled Putin and who spent his Senate career championing human rightsâwould be reduced to echoing Neville Chamberlain ("A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing").
