Anyone writing an essay today whose conceit is that if you squint you can see how Trump is doing no more than what he was elected to do is a jerkoff. I would've used a kinder term months ago—now I don't care. You have to be a jerkoff to be a political analyst who cannot describe what just happened.
Ezra Klein is a big fat phony.
You go boy
Why is President Obama amplifying an Ezra Klein essay in which Klein eliminates from history the fact that hundreds and hundreds of journalists asked Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign if his agenda was Project 2025 and *he lied to every single one of them, and every single American voter*?
Obama amplifies it because he’s a member of the elite political class and Ezra writes that way in order to maintain his own class, status and access to political elites.
You can't speak coherently about what has to happen in America now if you even allow for the possibility that Trump did not run the most deceitful campaign about what he planned to do as president that contemporary American politics has ever seen. Any attempt to legitimize his actions is grotesque.
I was plainly obvious during the campaign he was saying whatever he needed to in order to keep himself out of jail and to get into office to get revenge on the country that held him accountable. And I'm just a social media user, but was painfully obvious to me.
It truly is. But I ve pointed out that Obama sold us up the river every chance he could get as president.
Well don't forget our media, who absolutely would not discuss Project 2025, who did horse race coverage despite one candidate being a convicted felon and rapist who attempted a coup and every single time brushed off parallels between MAGA and white supremacy.
He lied about winning in 2020. He lied about the 2024 election being a landslide. He lied about voter fraud and election fraud. He pretended to have been vindicated in cases that merely ran out of time to imprison him. He ran as an open fascist who *still* wasn't honest with voters about his plans.
📎💥8/28/25 🚨 #HeatherHoney --> in charge of oversee our election💥❗ youtube.com/shorts/onfOb...
📎 #HeatherHoney who believes the 2020 election was stolen is now in charge of election integrity'💥 youtube.com/shorts/-gwQP...
I will just say these click whores who just learned a name this week are really not useful when all they do is read an article from national sources that also just learned her name this week
bsky.app/profile/r5-t...
Project 2025 was right there for anyone to read. But the media got those sweet ratings in 2016 and because the news has become for profit the truth never stood a chance.
Trump can't help but telegraph every single move. And every accusation is a confession. If he's talking hypothetically then the plan is already in motion.
Did he promise to raise prices on everything? No. But that's what he did. Did he promise to militarize all major cities? No—but that's what he's now doing. Did he promise to conduct insane raids arresting nonviolent immigrants? No—but he is. Did he say he'd denaturalize america? No. But he plans to.
Klein says—and Obama amplifies him in this—that it's at least possible that Trump is giving America what they said they wanted. But the data shows that voters pre-November had no idea what either candidate stood for or would do but clearly *didn't* support the policies we now see Trump was planning.
A clear majority didn't want the policies Trump was secretly harboring in 2024 and still don't want them. His agenda is wildly unpopular—and it's only a part of his base, which is a tiny fraction of Americans, who use the mantra "I voted for this." And most of *them* don't even know what he's doing.
I’d say around 38% of America is extremely happy with what is going on right now and because the GOP performed mass voter suppression efforts and mass propaganda with the help of Elmo, the MAGA minority is now fully in control and living their wildest dreams of destruction.
Much of the blame lies at the feet of the media. Not indie media—which has been getting Trump right for about 10 years now—but exactly the sort of mealy-mouthed lukewarm respectability-politics jerkoffs like Klein who've been years behind all of their peers but know how to play major media's games.
We're still 5 or 6 years from Klein mentioning even 5% of the info on Trump's criminal activities that shows up with full sourcing in the 7 books of the Proof Series. Which means we're 5 or 6 years from Obama amplifying those truths. But *we're not going to have a fucking country* in 5 or 6 years.
Thank you for this thread. I agree 100%. It amazes me that people are ignoring what’s clearly in front of their faces. I’m no political expert, but I could see this coming years ago. When MSM refused to report on the insanity, this was the only outcome. Did not expect the GOP to TOTALLY submit tho.
I will continue to say that the blood spilled by the Trump Administration is very much on the hands of the mainstream/corporate media. They normalized him ten years ago and demanded perfection out of his opponents. I hope their names are dragged through the mud in history books.
I'm so *livid* at the fact that Dems who read the news and basically everyone in indie media understands that America is speeding toward a collapse of its culture, economy, rule of law, and international influence but but we must *still* be subjected to utter gobshite from mainstream media everyday.
This was a test. The MSM failed. But it's no wonder. The legacy media is a corporate industry that cares about its bottom line and how to best pander to those in power. The fiddle as Rome burns and tell us it's not their job to take sides.
It's galling. I feel like I'm the crazy one some days. Just shouting into an uncaring void.
It is all.. so damn difficult to believe the insane way “they” seem to want us to think, live and do. Regime supporters.. were mad at Biden for asking them to wear masks… yet. Omg. Yet today… 🤬🤬🤬 We all wake up every day with SO much disbelief.
It was clear two years ago that Project 2025 and Trump planned to drain all monies from everything but Criminal Justice, Immigration, National Security and the Military, and that those formerly separate pots would in fact be one pot aimed at controlling the American population via government force.
I’ll never understand. Ever
Welcome to Canada's CBC News.
Seth, please take your meds
the people should have taken to the streets, stormed the gates, when mcconnell denied garland's nomination. it should have been a five alarm fire, but, as you say, the media played it as "politics... what can ya do?!", and to ice the cake, it was mcconnell who gave us trump and his russian pals.
What's amazing is that Trump is both the most dishonest and the most honest politician. Dishonest because he lies even when the truth would help him. Honest because he has never hidden who he was, not since the 70s anyway, even foreigners saw it. Many Americans have lied (or stupided) to themselves.
Finally, someone says TRUTH! Recently retired History teacher....making plans to leave due to lack of Resistance
Please Klein is in that Chuck Todd’s class. He has no credibility!
Fuck Ezra Klein AND Obama. Neither is doing a damn thing to help America right now.
I knew when trump frist ran Republicans were up to some shady shit..
Why not make your excellently researched proof series and other articles free after they earn you some amount? That could help get the word out.
Damn fine analysis. Thank you! Ezra is a fucking moron. But acceptably milquetoast.
Most Dems are running scared! Trump and MAGA threaten people and there are some nuts with big guns on the right!
We have big guns on the left too. Just sayin.
The only way we’re going to beat this is violence I’m just not sure if people are willing to do that in this country but none of this is gonna happen voluntarily
Kamala warned everyone, Obama warned everyone but the same Tea Party ers who couldn't stand having a Black man as the president and depicted him as The Joker hanging him in effigy are now struggling in Trump's economy and might even lose healthcare. Just admit you voted for a racist NAZI.
The mealy-mouthed media!! Perfect
Mealy mouthed is the perfect description. People, including the mainstream media, don’t understand the gravity of what is happening. They assume (wrongly as we know from accounts of revolutions),that their lives would be in turmoil, if Trump were actually carrying out a fascist revolution.
#MSMservesBillionaires
He's rebranding ThirdWay and selling it on all the dem platforms with a jazzy sounding name. I mean who could possibly be against abundance, right? >>
But as the surrogates who don't really admit they're surrogates end up saying, they plan to push for the deregulation part first. Gotta do that cuz big companies are "the only ones" who can build all that housing. How about helping ordinary people lead the housing boom?
Just ask the Cubans in South Miami how they feel about how he campaigned on immigration vs how he is executing is immigration policy now. Now I will say most Latinos knew he was lying his ass off.
@ezraklein.bsky.social's whole thing, which drives me nuts, is to blame Dems for the rise of Trump because of some "messaging" thing. The perfect Message™ is not gonna fix it. It's a bandwidth problem to fight back against the RW propaganda machinery, not a message content problem. That's what he /1
The media is just utterly failing to meet this moment. It’s wild to watch them just lay down and capitulate under some false premise of having to portray “both sides.” How about this: when it’s been democracy and fascism there aren’t two sides that both deserve the same coverage
💯 I think it's 1) a consequence of habit formed when neither side was completely batshit crazy / fascist. They can't adapt to the new reality. 2) Fear of retribution, & 3) takeover by RW oligarchs or oligarchs who have decided to trade principle for "safety" - being on the good side of the fascists.
This, exactly! No party is perfect, but objectively, Harris ran a far better campaign than Trump. Dems have a far better message than Repubs. But they have the bandwidth. Because grifts work for a reason. Dems don’t grift, it doesn’t work on their supporters. The GOP does.
💯 Kamala's / Tim's message was fine and there were lots of concrete proposals to address real problems - healthcare, cost of living, climate change, murderous dictators invading sovereign lands, etc. Trump had tariffs and "mass deportation". No one can tell me it was a message problem for the D's.
Why does the GOP grift work on Dem voters? You see my point?
doesn't get. And also, it's always the Dems fault, as if the R's have no agency in the matter of their own behavior. 🤦🏼♂️ /2
Totally agree. It's a unified effort of deception vs. a diversified analysis for balanced consensus. Guess which one wins? People are lazy and the right provides a convenient simplification.
The right wing lie machine, mostly Fox News has set a new reality in America: "heads we win and tails you lose." Also left is now right, down is up and white is black. I'm not sure how anyone can ever fight them, or reason with them again.
I hear what you're saying, Seth but it doesn't help us to bicker amongst ourselves. People like Ezra should be shown how they're not helpful, or even wrong, and then those established voices will be more powerful influencers.
To be very clear, Dems ARE partially to blame. Not majority to blame, but they definitely bear some. One example: ALL the policies that WE wanted & which they failed repeatedly to pass or even propose into legislation. Another: Failing to LISTEN to US for YEARS, instead, working for their donors.
At this point it doesn’t really matter. At this point, if nothing is done, we will never have an honest election again.
No, the main problem with not getting more stuff passed is that we didn't vote enough real D's into office. Manchin and Sinema proved to not be real D's, and they torpedoed lots of legislation that the Biden administration had proposed.
Who is "us" and what policies? Those of the radical Left?
No one should listen to that guy. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is.
Now, the GOP has also been spewing their propaganda and building their info networks for decades and Dems have just sat quietly. It was clear back in 2000 that we needed left-wing media infrastructure & Dems did nothing.
The RW propaganda machinery was driven mostly by RW oligarchs, not the R party. Plus, it's the sad truth that fearmongering, racism, and conspiracy sells. Truth does not. It's an uphill battle but it has to be fought or we're toast. There's no other way out. And yet we *still* have endless /1
The current president is a pedo #pedopotus
About the size of it. i stopped paying much attention to the Times, Klein and his ilk, and the MSM in general almost a decade ago because of this. They are all complicit.
The media knew he was best friends with Epstein. The stockpile of photos. This is what happens when billionaires send their lobbyists to purchase politicians .
The media did not report on voter suppression. @gregpalast.bsky.social Harris was cheated out of 3,650,000 votes by these Jim Crow tricks. 4.7 million voters purged. 3.2 million registrations rejected. 2.1 million mail-in ballots tossed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Xd...
The media did report on voter suppression, though it was widely known about. Harris was cheated out of 3,650,000 votes by these Jim Crow tricks. 4.7 million voters purged. 3.2 million registrations rejected. 2.1 million mail-in ballots tossed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Xd...
stop blaming the media. They gave more than ample coverage to Project 2025 -- but it was Harris' job to convince voters that Trump would implement it. and she failed to do so, largely because she and Biden had spent the prior 3 and a half years downplaying Trump's perfidy.
Bingo
What percentage of American voters do you think consume “media” or read ANYTHING?
You may be right about their ignorance, but I doubt it. I think they know exactly what is happening and they love it.
I've been saying this for years: most have no clue what is coming. And unfortunately, it's a hard lesson that many countries have had to learn, and it's time for Americans to be knocked off their high horses, I'm afraid. BUt the suffering they will endure will be heartbreaking 😔
It’s possible you wear a blindfold purposefully and with malintent. You remind me of those fascism-deniers I ruthlessly argued with in 2017. Keep talking.
He fucking told the stupidest among us that he didn't to know anything about Project 2025 and he didn't want to know anything about Project 2025.
Everything he’s doing now, is announced in Project 2025. Even the immigration. People were just to blind, selfish or stupid to read it. Or they blindly followed him when he said he didn’t know the document. Or they picked what interested them and ignored the rest. And even now, people are still in
the denial stage and they think it’s business as usual or they think they will all be over after the elections.
I guess we should stop expecting establishment Democrats to understand and be able to take on the authoritarian regime and the fascism they’ve unleashed on us.
The sad part is that most of those don't even care what he does. They just chalk all this up to some tribal victory they get to participate in over those their TV tells them to be scared of.
Secretly? As soon as the Republican party deleted their platform to elect trump you should have assumed the worst case scenario was coming. Hillary Clinton herself called him out for being a Russian puppet and people laughed at her. This country sucks.
This is a crucial distinction. Among voters who were aware of Project 2025, the overwhelming majority (nearly 80%) disapproved of it. Source navigatorresearch.org/americans-in...
I saw it as a dis to American voters. Like ok people this is what you wanted so.. it was nonsensical to have Obama elevate that bs. Infuriating.
I just listened to Klein with Radley Balko. I think you’re somewhat off here. Alarm bells are sounding.
I agree with everything above this post. But on this one I diverge. Trump is giving then what his gut wanted. Racism. Mostly subconscious, in their gut there is an itch that is being satisfied.
It was spelled out in Project 2025, but no one believed it.
It's my contention that the electorate is ignorant or uncaring. Anyone with half a brain could have seen the Trump train wreck coming and people still voted for the train wreck.
I will never trust any politician.
Thank you for pointing this out. My sense of EK these past few years is that what he cares about most is his own popularity, and if he believes half of the BS he writes, I feel sorry for him. He doesn't care who or what he takes down in his effort to be seen as the smart guy in the room.
Sure, they didn't want these policies. But what did they expect, when they voted for a convicted criminal who lies his way out every single time? 🤷♂️ I mean, if Ted Bundy promises you a happy life with him and you're stupid enough to trust him despite his murders, who is to blame when you get killed?
If voters didn't know the policies of either candidate then maybe they shouldn't have voted! As it stands, far more red voters went team red than blue went team blue. Generally blue voters are at least somewhat aware of policy. Red team voters weren't expecting to get hurt. FAFO in full effect.
I noticed the SAME thing when reading the text of the conversation. How can any self declared "analyst" ascribe ANY semblance of "good faith" to the greatest manipulative conman in the world? Looks like analysts have been conned as well - to a certain extent. And STILL don't get it.
You lost me with your Obama dissing. If he was still potus we wouldn't be where we are today.
If he was still POTUS we’d be in a different sort of constitutional crisis; Obama respects the rule of law. He’s always been a centrist who thought he could negotiate with racists though.
@barackobama.bsky.social @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social Please read this analysis of your flimsy analysis …
He absolutely promised to militarize major cities and I’m not sure why you insist on rewriting history aside from benefiting from this blatant display of political operative behavior.
How many more days before the first denaturalization ceremony? The WH is planning it right now.
And when we, or his opponents said that his economic policies would absolutely raise prices on everything, that his large-scale deportations would HAVE to involve insane raids of nonviolent immigrant communities, and many other policies would ignore law and precedent, we were dismissed as alarmists.
Alarmist... or projecting/confessing that's the ish they actually want?
Alarmist Conspiracy theorists Drama queens because they hadn't heard what I was telling them in any news program.
Did he promise all these things he's doing now? No. But actually, all he has to do now is deny he's doing those things, and he will get away with murder, just as he always has. It looks like it was the will of the people that this felon gets away with murder.
Seth, you’re right, I remember the night that Trump was elected crying to my husband, you don’t know what he will do. My husband told me to calm down. Now, he tells me many times that he is sorry for not believing me.
I can't think of anything he's said in the last several years that *wasn't* a lie... Well, except for that thing about being able to shoot someone on 5th Ave without losing any votes. That was definitely true.
Correction: the core cases against DJT1 were willingly & knowingly *forced* to run out of time by Garland, as proxy of Biden. There is no passive or innocence/benevolence in all this, it was all active, malevolent, aiding & abetting. See @sarahkendzior.bsky.social's 'They knew'....
And he got elected….your problem is your fellow Americans who did that despite all of the above.
Hope they wake up soon. People that comment about Dems getting 2028 landslide, do not get it, they will cheat in 26, they are trying to now. Though Texas fucked that up, like they do everything else.
I think he cheated and I don't know why that isn't talked about more.
Respectability prevents the villagers from seeing what is barreling right down on top of them, and their collective pride shields them from describing it after the fact. How many of those parroting the menace of WMDs lost their platforms? How many who go it 100% right got gigs at MSNBC?
I agree with you. Obama and some others high up don't have skin in the game like you and I and most of us. It is easy to feel more detached and safer when you are a multimillionaire with secret service, connections, and many safe places to go.
Why don't you put your energy into attacking the actual enemy?
Centrist vanilla corporate Democrats are almost as bad as Trump & MAGA
because sanitizing it is collaborating with it, girly bop also, “the actual enemy” likely isn’t using bsky
😂
🤭
The WHY is because @barackobama.bsky.social & Ezra Klein have been good friends for a decade. Someone needs to tell Obama to WAKE the hell up & actually do something other than a few social media posts now & again. He was supposed to help train the next generation of Dem politicians. He's failed.
and none of those journalists pushed back because corporations had already taken over the free press
Donald has very seldom said anything truthful
How could they expect anything else but a lie? I knew, thousands of us knew, he’d follow through with 2025 if he got elected. Didn’t know it was a fait accompli before November. So leave or stay. What will you do, Seth?
I stopped listening to Obama years ago when the words "clean coal" came out his mouth.
Obama is part of the old “genteel” Democrats, who honestly, erroneously, believe that reason will prevail. It won’t. It’s war, and unless something massive moves in to stop the Trump regime, it’s literally going to get bloody.
How does President Obama not see that? Why don’t more of them see that and act?
I wish I knew.
I often get similar reactions when I debate w ppl. Usually we wnd on them saying that the way ahead is new, fraught, very dangerous, scary. To which I agree and point out that THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T LET FASCISTS IN THE HOUSE. Once they are in, all bets are off.
It’s going to require brazen and, often disgusting, behavior on our part. But moving forward is more important than a tea party.
And it'll be different than the often-cited German example, for many reasons (economy, political system, geography,....)
STOP PROJECT 2025!! Why is this not shouted from the rooftops! REMOVE THE POLYP!!
He lied during his whole 1st term, during his whole life, so I suppose people voted for this 🤷♂️ They want a president who says what they want to hear, not what is real.
And they let him get away with it
Serious question: if someone is gullible enough to believe a lie this obvious, is there anything that better journalism could do to fix that?
Yup.
It's masturbatory nonsense - jerkoff is absolutely correct.
Right, there's a big difference between what Trump said he was going to do and what those of us who are capable of observing the obvious knew he was going to do. Not sure why this is so tough to sort out for some people.
Klein makes BANK whether Dems win or Lose. In fact his Bank probably goes up when they lose (worried Dems consume more 'liberal' media). He's been Money/Equity class for years, now. His interests are *not* our interests.
Many pundits still don't get a brilliant criminal mastermind - when he brainwashed his followers about tariffs, he KNEW he was going to use that for grift, blackmail, and power. When he talked about mass deportation, he KNEW he was going to use that to create his own paramilitary/police state. 1/1
When he talked about being "dictator on day 1" he KNEW it wasn't gonna be just day 1. Most people have no criminal imagination, and no power of keen observation. Jackie Speier mentioned how similar Jim Jones was to Trump. That was overlooked by people who don't understand what led to Jonestown. 1/2
Brilliant cult leaders always usher in utter destruction. Maga is the biggest cult ever, with a leader that has more power and reach than ANY other cult leader before him. I don't know what it's going to take for people to get this. 1/3 end
