No capitulation to MAGA here

So I'm stuck in the Harvey Milk Terminal of the San Francisco airport for a long day (boring story of weather near destination colliding with airline schedules) so I got a chance to try to get in my walking miles in the corridors. You'll be glad to know that SFO is paying no attention to Trump's commands to erase women, POC Americans, queers and history. 

 

Northern California was a center of WWII war production, so there is a lot to display.

 

Women had a job to do to defeat fascism. War mobilization broke a lot of barriers. Even knowing what we know now of the underbelly of US empire, it's possible to admire their spunk.

 

 

They weren't all eager pink-cheeked white girls either. 

The Harvey Milk terminal at SFO is a monument to all MAGA hates. Nice place to involuntarily spend a day.

Trans Day of Visibility 2025

As I walked up to the Teslatakedown protest on Saturday, I was greeted by this guy.

The Trans Day of Visibility weekend had begun. 

This is not an observance I know much about, so I looked up what the media advocacy outfit GLADD had to share about it.

International TDOV was created in 2010 by trans advocate Rachel Crandall. Crandall, the head of Transgender Michigan, created TDOV in response to the overwhelming majority of media stories about transgender people being focused on violence. She hoped to create a day where people could celebrate the lives of transgender people, while simultaneously acknowledging that due to discrimination, not every trans person can or wants to be visible.

Given that only a minority of Americans say they personally know someone who’s transgender, the vast majority of the public learns about trans people from the media, including TV, film, and news. This is a problem because, as shown in the Netflix documentary Disclosure, the media has misrepresented, mischaracterized, and stereotyped trans people since the invention of film. These false depictions have indisputably shaped the cultural understanding of who trans people are and have modeled, often for the worse, how the average person should react to and treat trans people in their own lives.

Evident in 2025 is intensifying vitriol and attacks against trans people led by a vocal but loud minority. ... That’s why it’s still necessary for trans people to be seen through authentic, diverse, and accurate stories which reflect the actual lived experiences of trans people; both for themselves and for the people who believe they’ve never met a trans person.

Trans people care about the coup against our country as much as anyone. Maybe more, in fact, being involuntary targets on the front lines...

• • •

For the Trans Day of Visibility, Aaron Scott, Episcopal Church Staff Officer for Gender Justice, preached a sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. I'm including short excerpts here which I hope retain its power for a broad audience; there's much more. Read it in full here.

... We are, in the end, a small community, very much under the boot of repression. And yet we continue to lead.

We speak for ourselves.

We set forth our own vision for what justice means for our people—trans and nonbinary people. 

... It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

It’s a beautiful day to exist, in flagrant defiance of executive orders. January 20th came and went and I still haven’t been whisked away to Oz—like the rapture, but for trans people only. I briefly wondered, “Am I not transgendering hard enough, if two whole months have gone by and I’m still stuck here in America?!”

And then I remembered myself, and I remembered: this is a sham. Because we have always been here and we are not going anywhere, ever.

We determine what justice means for us in our bodies, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in our workplaces, in our country. And while we need everyone here to join with us in that struggle, we are the ones responsible for setting the vision. We are the experts on when we are free. Only we get to say when we are truly safe, truly honored, truly afforded our God-given dignity and rights. So thank you to every trans and nonbinary person here for the visions you put forward into the world. Thank you for standing in your power and your leadership.

... We will only get what we are organized to take. No powers and principalities are going to hand trans people our joy and our thriving ... out of their benevolence. That’s not how change happens. Change comes because we demand it, and we labor for it. So today we celebrate our joy—and tomorrow we get back to work organizing to defend our joy. Organizing to defend our young people. Organizing to defend our dignity. Organizing to draw in more and more people to stand with us, move with us.

And we can’t do all that on an empty tank, so today: We sing. We shout. We strut. We swagger. We rejoice in our trans-ness so that the memory of this joy can continue to carry us forward even in the hard times.

... Trans joy is not about marketing a false, palatable version of ourselves. It is about enjoying being alive and not dead.

... We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected.

... The more that trans people stand in our joy and our full messy humanity without apology, the more powerful we become. That is why this day is important. The less afraid we are to live—even when there is so much to fear—the stronger we get.

#Teslatakedown – San Francisco – Saturday, March 29

The crowd outside the dealership on Van Ness Avenue just gets larger each week.

Perhaps 500 people yesterday? Each Saturday there are more protesting Elon's car company while he works to destroy American democracy. Next week this crew will take a week off to join the Hands Off protest at Civic Center -- but the following week (April 12) they'll be back.

That seems a good idea.

 

A simple and patriotic message here.

This does seem on the right track for a nice spring day.

 

 In our various ways, The Defiance needs to show staying power.

See no evil: the toll of the Trump team's Signal chat lapse(s?)

Wouldn't they have loved to get the intel on D-Day?

The people whose lives might be at risk as a result of the Trump team's frat boy approach to national security are not amused.

Signal Chat Leak Angers U.S. Military Pilots
Men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States expressed bewilderment after the leak of attack plans. “You’re going to kill somebody,” one pilot said.

Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs and use of her right arm when the combat helicopter she piloted in the Iraq war was shot down, had a very direct response

Duckworth: ‘Pete Hegseth is a ‘f‑‑‑ing liar’ “...This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately,” Duckworth said in a statement. 

The Washington Post's judicious columnist Philip Bump unpacks what accountability for the security breach might look like and why we won't get it from the Trump clown show.

The point of accountability is to reinforce that bad things are bad. ...

... Trump — and by extension his party — have proved increasingly likely to rise to the defense of anyone seen as under fire from any perceived opponent. (“Deny, deny, deny,” Trump once reportedly advised an ally.) In any previous administration, Hegseth wouldn’t be the secretary of defense in the first place. Deeply unqualified (beyond his closeness to Trump) and mired in multiple scandals, he was nonetheless confirmed by a Republican-led Senate unwilling to face the ire of Trump. Since the Signal scandal broke, Hill Republicans — a group ostensibly empowered to enforce accountability from the executive branch — have not indicated any newfound appetite for challenging the White House. No one thinks the Justice Department, helmed by some of the more energetic Trump sycophants in America, will launch any serious investigation.

Without accountability, the damage here would not simply be that the U.S. government will continue to be led by people who don’t know or don’t care why communications about military operations occur over secure channels. It is also that there will be no public signal that the actions of these officials were bad. No signal to others in government. No signal to Trump’s base of support. No signal to America’s overseas allies that this government holds such mistakes to account.

This is precisely what (the deeply insecure) Trump wants to avoid, of course. He will happily malign people who used to serve under his direction — but always as he introduces some imaginary distance from them. It would be very hard for him to do so with Hegseth in particular: He picked and advocated Hegseth despite concerns about his readiness; if the criticisms of Hegseth were accurate, then so were the criticisms of Trump.

What results is a weird (and for the right, ironic) moral relativism, one centered on the whims and actions of Donald Trump. We know that religious conservatives revamped their moral boundaries once Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. What we’ve seen since is an entire party willing to shift black-and-white moral and ethical issues into a muddy, gray area in which Trump alone remains untainted.

Republican politicians have replaced both common sense and elementary ethical calculation with "Anything for Mr Trump." They've become servile as well as ignorant.

Friday cat blogging

Two cats, one bed. Despite the size discrepancy, Janeway holds her own when Mio approaches. They work it out, often by both abandoning the choice window spot.

An abomination, not a mere embarrassment

Last night, I had terrible dreams of encroaching deaths and horrors. I am not the only one living with bad dreams

This morning I opened Facebook to this, from the Rev. Br. Richard Edward Helmer, Rector of the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in Mill Valley, California.

Beyond American Vulgarity
It is arguably very late to say something, but the glorified visage of the Secretary of Homeland Security standing in front of half-naked, deported, incarcerated prisoners who had no recourse to due process — incarcerated, I should add, in an overseas prison with no access to legal representation and completely voided of their rights — a prison bought and paid for with U.S. tax dollars…

…crossed the line for me from the all-too-familiar vulgarity of this administration into outright obscenity.

No cynical veneer of deterring illegal immigration or criminality holds when those in power glorify the treatment of basic human life and freedoms with no greater notice than did the “owners” of those caught in chattel slavery or, for that matter, the overseers of concentration camps.

This is a criminal administration for its utter contempt for human dignity and rights, for its corrupt anti-constitutional assumption and conflation of the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury, and for its sheer bloody-mindedness when confronted with simple appeals for the truth. We are witnessing an abomination, not a mere embarrassment. All the more so because so many in this cabal lay claim to Christian faith as justification for their actions. There is nothing Christian about this. To say otherwise is blasphemy.

The bone-chilling truth is that this line, departing from all valued constitutional process that this government was sworn to uphold, puts all of us — citizen and immigrant alike — in danger. From abroad, reprisal and encouragement to every enemy of human dignity and freedom. And from within: If the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers may be treated with such open and gleeful contempt by this presidency, so may the rights of our citizens. Some would say that may in fact may be the point. In which case I say we are already tumbling over the precipice.

Our work ahead could not be clearer. Wherever we are, whoever we are, we must be doubly-prepared to stand up, speak up, and take action to preserve dignity, rights, and freedoms while we still can. If we do, our children will thank us.

If we do not, they will never forgive us.

The crime is in plain sight

Somebody on social media created this all-too-appropriate image.

 

Our rulers are running national security like a marginally competent, clubby family business. They don't trust the apparatus of government, so they have been going "off the books" to try to do their stuff. Since they are mostly ignorant light-weights, they are making a dangerous mess.

People keep suggesting that the Trumpies are so much more competent this time around. Not so. They've just found new, less orderly, and more vicious ways to impose themselves on the American state and people.

Paul Waldman explains how it is all about grievance.

No Republican alive has felt the kind of intoxicating surge of power they are experiencing right now, not because of the size of their 2024 electoral victory but because they have collectively decided that with sufficient aggression and creativity, they can go after just about every individual or institution that ever pissed them off. Even as they set about destroying the federal government, they are expanding its power to harass and intimidate their enemies wherever they may be found.

Incompetently of course, but no less malicious for that. 

Trump amplifies the stupid

Maybe this wasn't the smartest move?

Most people watching around the world recognizes foolish pride mixed with incompetence when they see it. 

And any woman who has competed with a particular sort of oblivious man for a job knows the special stupidity unqualified guys bring to tasks in which they are pretending to expertise they don't possess. (Few women get to try that dodge.) Here's journalist Jill Filipovic:

I cannot emphasize enough that these people do not know what they are doing. They were hired not in spite of that fact, but because of it. Hegseth, Gabbard, and the rest of mostly-men who make up the Trump administration clown show would simply never have otherwise ascended to the positions in which they currently find themselves. No other president would have appointed them, because other presidents at least try to appoint for competence. 

Trump knows that people who have no career prospects without him will do whatever they need to do to stay in his good graces. And that matters more to him than actually getting anything done, or keeping America safe and prosperous.

When your only route to power runs through one man, you are loyal to that one man.

This group chat debacle is not an aberration; it is a predictable result of what happens when you put a bunch of people in power who don’t know what they’re doing, and when you fire everyone who does know something. 

Trump’s paranoia about the Deep State being out to get him is amplified in his second term; he feels that last time around, his ambitions were thwarted by career civil servants and those who had careers before him and ambitions after him. So this time, the confidence man has gotten rid of the competent men.

... Incompetent people behave incompetently. That’s all part of the plan.

What more are these fools broadcasting to a listening world?

Oh Canada! as so often, DJT is shaming us

What if they don't want to get married? 

Historian Marc-William Palen knows a lot more about Canada, and also about the real world consequences of tariffs, than Donald Trump. Trump's attempt to make Canada the 51st state by economic coercion is a re-run of a plan tried by the late 19th century McKinley administration, also to reverse effect.

While Trump’s protectionism and imperial designs are a sharp break with the recent past, they aren’t new. In fact, they’re part of a very old GOP playbook that dates to a period Trump regularly lionizes: the late 19th century. He sees it as a golden era in American history. Yet, the history of the 1890s actually exposes the dangers of the U.S. trying to force Canada into American hands.

Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.

To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs. 

Secretary of State James G. Blaine saw annexation as a way to eliminate continued and contentious competition over fish and timber. Blaine, who co-authored the McKinley Tariff, publicly stated that he hoped for “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.” Blaine declared himself “teetotally opposed to giving the Canadians the sentimental satisfaction of waving the British Flag. . . and enjoying the actual remuneration of American markets.” Privately, he admitted to President Benjamin Harrison that by denying reciprocity, Canada would “ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”

Things didn't work out that way. The McKinley tariff inspired Canadian resistance. 

Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister John Macdonald wanted to react forcefully to send a message to the U.S. He proposed retaliating with high tariffs on American goods, as well as increased trade with Britain. He also recognized a political weapon when he was handed one. He adroitly turned the 1891 Canadian elections into a broader referendum concerning Canadian-American relations. He portrayed the Liberal opposition as being in bed with the Republican annexationists. According to him, they were involved in “a deliberate conspiracy, by force, by fraud, or by both, to force Canada into the American union.”

It looks as if Canada's current prime minister Mark Carney is going to pull out an unexpected victory for the country's updated ruling Liberal Party thanks to the unpopularity of today's Conservative leader Pierre Polievre apeing Trump.

by way of Paul Krugman

Thanks Donald!

Wedding graphic by way of Adam Tooze.

 • • •

I grew up much more aware of and fond of Canada than most residents of the USofA. Canada was just across the Niagara River, shores to sail my little Sailfish to if I was being adventurous. Nobody worried much about the border when I was a kid. Canadians didn't mind US visitors to their side of Niagara Falls and we didn't mind Canadians coming to shop in Buffalo malls when for a moment the value of the currency made this a good deal. My father added a booster antenna to our house so we could watch hockey and other interesting broadcasts on Canadian TV. 

Interestingly, the US Secretary of State James G. Blaine mentioned here also figured in my early life because I went to high school with a descendant of that Republican luminary. Like me, she was interested in what we called "current events." 

Trump's assault on Canada makes me feel ill.

To "improve the world"

Did you know that Washington, DC -- the 68 square mile federal district and city -- is not truly self-governing? Because the city government exists on the sufferance of the national Congress, when Republicans control both Houses -- and DC's budget! -- they can dictate to the city.

And so the GOP Congress demanded that the Black Lives Matter Plaza be erased -- and it was. The mayor needed her budget approved. Talk about "no taxation without representation!" in the slogan of the American Revolution.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar often strikes me as the last judicious rationalist standing, determined to be a thoughtful reasonable man, come what may. And not only that, he seeks to find something affirmative in the worst of times. It can be a very difficult posture to maintain. But this piece of racist Republican vandalism in DC got to him. In every edition of his substack, he reflects on something that grabbed his attention. He wrote:

QUOTE OF THE DAY

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. -- Anne Frank (1929-1945), died at 16 in a Nazi concentration camp

Through her diaries written while hiding from Nazis for two years, Anne Frank has become an international symbol of hope and optimism, despite her tragic death at sixteen in a Nazi concentration camp. Her quote here is an inspirational call to action that most people can embrace.

However, what does it mean to “improve the world”? That question is where sunny optimistic slogans meet the harsh reality of the real world. The Nazis thought they were improving the world: They were ridding the world of inferior people. Lynch mobs thought the same thing: They were imposing social justice on uppity Blacks, thereby restoring natural order. Billionaire industrialists convince themselves, and others, that because they employ many people, whatever they do improves the world. Politicians, judges, and others in power justify their corrupt behaviors with the soothing mantra that they, too, are improving the world.

Musk and his cohorts refer to anyone who disagrees with them as NPCs, a gaming acronym for non-player character. They convince themselves that they are improving the world because those whose lives they are destroying aren’t real people, just stick figures to be manipulated. Their self-delusion is so complete that they are beyond reason.

It’s a game of fake virtue that anyone can play.

The dismantling of the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. hit me hard. Republicans threatened to withhold crucial funds for the city in order to bully the mayor into ripping up the pavement that featured the words Black Lives Matter. Why spend the money to do that except to insult, not just Black people, but the up to 26 million Americans who marched in support of BLM in 2020? This is a gauntlet thrown to the ground by Trump’s GOP that dissent will not be tolerated. How did this action improve the world? (FYI: It cost $610,000 to destroy.)

It would be easy to say that it’s all just a matter of point of view: One person’s ceiling is another person’s floor. It’s all just a friendly disagreement between two equally valid sides. But it rarely is. Evidence and logic usually favor one side more than the other. Yet so many people ditch evidence and logic in favor of a knee-jerk reaction that favors their biases. Examining evidence and employing logic requires rigorous research and thought. The process makes one feel overwhelmed and anxious, while just shouting a thoughtless opinion feels smart and virtuous, even though it is the opposite. But, as the saying goes, it is better to feel good than be good. Of course, we should strive to feel good by doing good.

There are so many ways—large and small—to improve the world. I often ask myself, “What can I do today to make someone’s day better?” Chat with a neighbor. Sign an autograph. Lend a beloved book to a friend. Those are the small ways.

But I don’t think doing those small actions alleviates my responsibility to do the larger things that improve the world. To do whatever it takes to promote the American ideal that all people are created equal and deserving of equal opportunities. And fighting those who are marginalizing people and punishing dissenters, while enriching themselves at the cost of the U.S. Constitution.

I don’t need to wait a single moment to do that.

Kareem's musing are available here.

Trump/Musk is coming for your mail service

The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) -- that's the postal workers union -- held rallies all over the country today against the Trump/Musk threat to privatize the post office. They were out in force on San Francisco's Embarcadero today.

Trump and Musk probably don't know this, but the US Constitution explicitly empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads." The USPS is one of the original functions of the federal government, right in there alongside raising an army for defense.

NALC sure doesn't trust Trump's Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and DOGE to identify inefficiencies in the complex nationwide mail system.

The union issued a letter:

As DOGE attempts to tackle [financial and pension issues] at the Postal Service, it is important that they know what our members do and who they are. Letter carriers are lifelines to American communities who uphold our Constitutionally mandated service obligation by delivering to 169 million delivery points, including 51.5 million rural households and businesses, six and sometimes seven days a week.

Five years ago, during a global pandemic when most businesses shut down, letter carriers did not take one day off. We did not work from home. Instead, we delivered every single day, just as we have for 250 years.

... Common sense solutions are what the Postal Service needs, not privatization efforts that will threaten 640,000 postal employees’ jobs, 7.9 million jobs tied to our work, and the universal service every American relies on daily.

As is true in so many arenas, the people most likely to be hurt by diminished postal service are poor and rural folks -- so many of whom were Trump voters. Let's all of us stand up for a strong national postal service. It's part of what brings us together as one country.

All out against Trump/Musk ...

Resistance looks different in Trump 2.0. But that doesn't mean there isn't any. In fact, say scholars of protest Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam, "Resistance is alive and well in the United States."

Doubt this? They've collected the evidence. 

... since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago. ... In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017, which included major protests against the so-called Muslim ban along with other pro-immigrant and pro-choice protests. 

Their study of popular movements gives them a framework within which to describe what resistance works in the face of broad challenges to rule of law and democracy.

Historically, street protest and legal challenges are common avenues for popular opposition to governments, but economic noncooperation — such as strikes, boycotts and buycotts — is what often gets the goods. Individual participation is deliberately obscure, and targeted companies may have little interest in releasing internal data. Only the aggregate impacts are measurable — and in the case of Tesla, Target and other companies, the impacts so far have been measurable indeed.

Consider the protests against Tesla [join by way of Tesla TakeDown] in response to Elon Musk firing federal workers and blocking federal funding. The multifaceted campaign has a quite specific goal: punish Tesla, Musk’s signature company. ...

... The MAGA faction controls the GOP and enforces strict discipline among its members through fear and the threat of a well-funded Republican primary opponent in the next election. The Supreme Court majority is solidly on the right. Elected GOP officials are abandoning town halls and discouraging constituents from calling their offices. Street protests endure but are increasingly surveilled and high-risk, as the detention of Mahmoud Khalil suggests. Uncertainty about whether the Trump administration will ignore the First Amendment and weaponize the government to persecute political oppositionists looms large.

In the face of such changes, the public’s most powerful options are often withholding labor power and purchasing power. ...The prominence of billionaires in the administration and populist anger toward them make this type of approach even more viable in today’s climate. 

The world stage offers inspiring examples.

... Indeed, the diversification of resistance methods puts the United States on a similar trajectory to many democracy movements of the past. ...in Czechoslovakia, six days after the Soviet invasion in 1968, the newspaper Vecerni Prah published “10 commandments,” writing: “When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU: 1. Don’t know 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t tell 4. Don’t have 5. Don’t know how to 6. Don’t give 7. Can’t do 8. Don’t sell 9. Don’t show 10. Do nothing.”

Read the scholars' Waging Nonviolence article about today's resistance here.

This pairs well with an eariler, time-honored response all of us need to know to any interaction for police or immigration cops. 

And be heartened that Bernie and AOC drew 30,000 people to a Denver rally against the regime yesterday. We are indeed everywhere.

Elon Musk is trying to buy a Wisconsin judge

This Schimel guy is really a piece of work; take a look.

Wisconsin elects its Supreme Court judges. Right now, the court leans toward Dems -- that is, in support of abortion rights for women and against a Republican plan to disenfranchise half of Wisconsin voters by corrupt gerrymandering. Electing Susan Crawford holds the line.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party is probably the most effective state party apparatus in the country. If any Dems can go up against Elon, it's WisDems. Our small donations can still help get out the vote in this April 1 election. Voting has already begun. 

I've contributed; if you can, you should too.

Stupid, destructive, and utterly unrealistic: that's our Prez say the economists!

Why are Trump, along with Musk and his Muskrats, breaking government and the institutions that make this country a somewhat livable place? Seems crazy.

A couple of our most significant economic thinkers took up the puzzle in the last few days. Short answer: yes, the Trump regime is crazy -- and vile too.

Adam Tooze is the preeminent English language economic historian of the 20th and 21st century world capitalist system. (I have written about his highly accessible books here, here, here and here.) He does the work to engage what passes for economic theory claimed by Trump's intellectual apologists and wrecking appointees. 

I began to wonder whether this search for a rational wing in Trump’s economic policy is not, in fact, a step towards sane-washing and whether this sane-washing is not driven by some engrained mainstream framings of America’s problems that react in sympathy with the Trump administration’s rhetoric of crisis and victimization even if they are out of sympathy with the Trump administration in general.

Is there a real and important continuity of problems in America’s political economy that at least parts of the new Trump administration are trying to address, thus forming a continuity with the Biden team and Trump 1.0?

Or is the shellshocked commentariat of 2025 in the grip of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in which our own inner fears lead us to engage with our captors in a way which denies the actual reality of being hurled into a mad house? Call it Mar-a-Lago (Accord) Syndrome.

... we are all struggling to find some kind of rational purchase on the unhinged situation created by the Trump administration.

Turns out, after serious engagement with some Trump apologists, that he finds "no there there" in Gertrude Stein's memorable formulation. 

The Stockholm syndrome element kicks in when we come to the original framing of the problem: The belief that something must be done. Once you are convinced that “something must be done”, you become vulnerable to someone hawking a big plan to “do things”.

Why do sane people in contemporary America believe that “something must be done”? Ignoring the reflexive element of crisis by which Trump himself is the main reason something must be done, which renders one susceptible to any big idea that might fix Trump (even if elements of that “fix” are shared with analysis offered by the Trump camp itself) etc etc, there are two main schools of thought:

• 1. American deindustrialization and class balance. ...

• 2. American debt....

Both arguments 1. and 2. are well known. Both are also contentious. No reader of Chartbook will be surprised to hear that I find both 1. and 2. unconvincing. But that is not my point here. My point is that if you do believe either 1. or 2. you need to be on your guard against Mar-A-Lago syndrome.

Even if you disapprove of the Trumpites style and lawlessness, you may be tempted to take at their word the more reasonable members of the highjack team who insist that they offer a dramatic and comprehensive plan to address the crisis you also believe in, leading you to lose track of the fact that … they are highjackers and they are holding you hostage!

By buying into the reality of underlying problem that Mar-A-Lago claims to be addressing you run the risk of overemphasizing the rational element in Trump 2.0.

Tooze simply finds no rational element.

None of us really knows where this clown car is headed and what drives it on its crazy course. It seems like a mystery even to many on board. Quite reasonably we look for elements of rationality. We ask: who inside MAGA 2.0 is thinking and what are their thoughts? We then relate that to our own efforts to diagnose America’s history and the history of the world economy. ...

... To historically minded people it is appealing for obvious reasons. But it puts us at risk of is underestimating the radicalism of the break marked by the Trump administration. In search of historical context we miss what is most historically significant. We avoid facing the conclusion that the vision of a Mar-a-Lago Accord may have more in common with grift, a protection racket or a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it.

Faced with Trump, the risk is that conventional realism is a form of escapism.

You can read the entire Tooze argument here. 

Paul Krugman, former NY Times columnist and Nobel Prize for economics recipient, comes to similar conclusions, even more pithily expressed. In trying to understand the Trump/Musk vandalism in government, he sees no plan -- just the wounded egos of ignorant men.

My guess, instead, is that it’s an ego thing, that Social Security has become to Musk what Canada has become to Donald Trump. Both men at one point said something stupid, something that would have turned them into laughingstocks if there weren’t so much fear in the air. But both men have been unable to let go, doubling down in what amounts to an attempt to redeem their initial foolishness.

In case you’ve forgotten, back in December, when Justin Trudeau visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump taunted him by suggesting that Canada become a U.S. state, calling him “Governor Trudeau.” Some people suggested that it was meant as a joke, but it would be more accurate to call it a dominance display.

Trump's chief of staff listens to him threaten to annex Canada

But once Trump realized how ridiculous the performance made him look, he refused to let go. Instead, annexing Canada seems to have become a fundamental plank of Trump’s foreign policy, with his demands getting ever more insistent the more obvious it becomes that Canadians loathe the idea.

Since then, Musk has replicated his insecure co-president and put Social Security under the gun:

Musk’s big blooper was his claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This claim probably reflected the failure of young Musk staffers — what Dudek called the “DOGE kids” — to understand how the SSA’s databases work, combined with a complete lack of common sense. I mean, if there really were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security payments, don’t you think someone else would have noticed?

In a normal political environment, getting something that big that wrong would have destroyed Musk’s credibility and led to his permanent exile from any role in setting policy. But this is America in 2025, so Trump amplified the already-refuted claim when addressing Congress, and Musk seems more powerful than ever.

Furthermore, Musk refuses to give up his Social Security smears, making the completely implausible claim that fraudulent use of Social Security numbers accounts for 10 percent of federal spending. And I’d argue that that the plan to effectively cut off many disabled Americans is best seen as part of a desperate effort to find or pretend to find Social Security fraud, retroactively justifying Musk’s big mistake.

Still, does the plan have to be this cruel to the most vulnerable Americans? As I see it, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug.

... It's hard to escape the sense that DOGE staffers are actually enjoying this. And why not? We’re mostly talking about poorly socialized young men suddenly given the power to ruin other people’s lives, taking their cues from a leader who has declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western society is empathy.” So why should we be surprised that the DOGE kids’ rampage through the government looks more and more like a remake of Lord of the Flies?

Krugman read Tooze's screed and agrees. 

Look, I understand that it’s more fun to write an article about the supposed emergence of a new economic philosophy than to write yet another article about how ignorant men are, once again, saying stupid things. And I guess some journalists are uncomfortable at the thought that people with great power to shape policy have no idea (or rather nothing but false ideas) what they’re doing. 

But trying to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpist international economic policy is sanewashing that misinforms readers rather than helping their understanding.

... My point is that Trump believes many blatantly false things that suit his prejudices. Why imagine that he and his courtiers have sophisticated ideas and a deep strategy when it comes to international economics?

On the surface, Trump’s trade policy looks stupid and destructive. Dig deeper, and you discover that this first impression was completely valid. Trying to pretend otherwise is just misinforming readers.

We don't have to be overawed because these guys are considered some of the best academia has to offer in their field. They care about being understood and they have given us the goods: Trump's economic antics are stupid and cruel, without any rationality beyond grift and grievance. 

Why attacking Tesla is a good tactic in this moment

This fantasy Boston Tesla Party is extreme, but the national impulse among those repelled by co-president Musk and all his doings is smart. 

Why?

•  Generic conscience boycotts of big retailers, especially ones with few retail outlets to disrupt, are usually poorly targeted to get results. Sure, we can "boycott Amazon" but it will likely remain impossible to quantify whether we are having any impact. (Yes, Bezos is a pig-- but his creation does deliver actual value to many people.)

• But Tesla is an ideal boycott target because it's almost more a brand than a car these days, floating on marketing hoopla. In 2008, Tesla succeeded by being a "cool" breakthrough in EV tech. Today, Elon's fascist antics make his cars "uncool." And that matters when their value proposition is has become mostly hype.

• Once upon a time, Teslas were uniquely innovative, introducing the possibility of viable EVs in car-centered American life. But Tesla has serious competitors these days. No need to buy a Tesla to get the technological and self-congratulatory ego boost that many people get from buying a less polluting car.

• And having opened the EV market, Tesla hasn't improved its product much. The cybertruck is an ugly horror. Again, there are alternatives and new classes of vehicles.

• Tesla's market includes many people repelled by Trump and Musk's antics. He hopes he can replace these buyers with Republicans? Fat chance! Trump may be dumb enough to go that way, but most of his non-MAGA followers are not.

• Even Elon's investors fear he has lost the thread with his car company in his ketamine-addled rampages. His shareholders ask questions.

Let's keep up the pressure. Consumers have hurt Tesla's stock price and thus Elon's bottom line. And his car company is still overvalued. 

Teslatakedown is working. And many people are located where they can join in. Let's make Teslas a sign of iniquity. When you live off hype, you can die from being submerged in a better story.

Up against the embodiment of crony capitalism

 

When you've got a mild appearing old white guy enthusiastically waving this sign outside a Tesla dealership, the Tesla brand is in trouble.

And it is. Carscoops thunders: Tesla’s Q1 Sales May Be Its Worst In Years As Analysts Warn Stock Could Sink 50%

And sales of the car are even worse in Europe than in the United States. If Elon weren't deluded by his inner conviction that he's an epic warrior for something or other, he'd notice he is on the way to brand failure. (Car publications will also tell you his cars aren't as good or innovative as they once seemed.)

The New York Times points out:

So many Democratic buyers appear to be fleeing Tesla that even Mr. Trump’s best sales pitch is unlikely to woo enough new customers to fill the vacuum, auto experts said. Analysts at JPMorgan predict Tesla will deliver its fewest cars in the first quarter than it had in three years.

“When you make your product unattractive to half the market, I promise you, you won’t increase your sales,” said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, an automotive research and consulting firm.

The Washington Post observes:

As Tesla shareholders press Musk to return his attention to the firm that made him the world’s richest person, the [photo op on the White House lawn] also highlighted how Musk’s deepening alliance with Trump has been boon and burden to his expansive business empire. 

... Musk’s bet that serving — and helping to lead — the MAGA onslaught will benefit him economically is risky to say the least,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University. “Musk’s companies may get so tainted in the eyes of many ordinary citizens that they will suffer irreparable damage to their reputations.”

“The danger for Musk is that he becomes the embodiment of crony capitalism,” Barrett said.

It's going to take awhile for the impact of other Trump/Musk depredations on our lives to become widely felt and visible. Maybe when Social Security no longer issues checks? Or your kid gets measles? The possibilities get wider by the day.

But you can speak out right now in front of Elon Musk's Tesla showrooms. Visit #teslatakedown to find an action near you.

An even more demanding #MeToo

In 1970, when federalized National Guard troops shot and killed students protesting the US war in Southeast Asia at Kent State University and Jackson State, pop singer and bard Holly Near offered a haunting lament and call to action: 

It could have been me, but instead it was you

So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two

I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs

A farmer of food and a righter of wrong

It could have been me, but in

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/holly-near-it-could-have-been-me-lyrics.html

It could have been me, but instead it was you

So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two

I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs

A farmer of food and a righter of wrong

It could have been me, but in

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/holly-near-it-could-have-been-me-lyrics.html

It could have been me, but instead it was you

So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two

I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs

A farmer of food and a righter of wrong

It could have been me, but instead it was you

And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through.

But if you can work for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom

 

If you can work for freedom I can too

There was so much action in that spring that hundreds of campuses and some cities were closed down.

 

Once again, we are tested. Can we too work for freedom?

In organizing people, we've learned that if we can connect our personal stories to broader (and usually disempowering) features of our lives, we can form connections which turn into collective action. 

The historian and journalist M. Gessen -- an immigrant and trans -- bravely takes this tack in the NY Times: 

... I became stateless when I was 14 and my family left the Soviet Union. In exchange for granting my parents, my brother and me exit visas, the U.S.S.R. stripped us of citizenship. For nearly a decade after we arrived in the United States, instead of a passport I carried a long rectangular booklet called a refugee travel document. Not being able to fill in the blank when asked for my nationality added a layer of complexity to some otherwise simple transactions, like opening a bank account, but I was young, white, female and, in the parlance of this country, “legal,” so the difficulties I experienced were not excessive. They were just enough to make me feel precarious.

In the decades since, life for noncitizens in the United States has grown much more difficult. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have pushed immigrants to the margins of American society, cutting off access to public assistance programs, limiting pathways to legal status and ramping up deportations. The giant bureaucracy of “immigration courts” took shape, though it hardly resembles any court system that U.S. citizens would encounter.

Those of us who enjoy the privilege of not-yet-questioned US citizenship can be there with some of those whose status in the country is under threat. The weekend I attended a workshop by the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity with Bay Resistance introducing "accompaniment." Accompaniment connects people trying to the navigate the immigration maze with others willing to just go along to appointments and court dates. Nobody should be alone. 

Gessen continues, describing the attack on their very being:

... The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place. In his Inaugural Address and one of his first executive orders, President Trump asserted that only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable. Trans people, in other words, do not exist. Executive orders aimed at banning any mention of transgender people from schools, banning trans athletes from women’s sports, ordering a stop to gender-affirming medical care for people under 19, and barring trans people from serving in the military followed. ...

The State Department stopped issuing passports with the “X” gender marker and began issuing passports consistent with the sex the applicant was assigned at birth, even if the person had legally changed gender. ...

... Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a loan, obtaining a driver’s license, and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders. ...

 Let's take on and take up Gessen's conclusion:

... You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population; the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights; the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. ...

... It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

Gessen is correct. But also, if we dare to pay attention, it is happening to all of us, personally.  We mostly just don't know it yet. The regime wants us all rendered less human, less humane. Nobody should be alone.

Learning from the students -- in Idaho

The school district in West Ada thought it was getting rid of the dread menace of D.E.I. when administrators ordered teacher Sarah Inama to take down a poster reading "Everyone is Welcome Here." This is what followed:

 

Enjoy. There's learning happening here.

Lines must be drawn

Crosspurposes: Christianity's broken bargain with democracy by Jonathan Rauch

This is a strange book. Someone -- don't remember who -- must have recommended it. I needed distraction while Democrats were failing us in DC yesterday, so I rushed through it.

Mr. Rauch is at pains, repeatedly, to express his diffidence about commenting on American Christianity -- after all, he's gay, Jewish, and a non-believer in all things religious. And he should be diffident. This book, purportedly about American Christianity, contains nothing about Catholics, nothing about the Black church, nothing about Latino religiosity, and darned little to suggest there are any women in the mix. He gives mainline Protestantism a once-over-lightly, rushing on to center white evangelical Protestantism. (Actually membership in the mostly white mainline denominations is about the same percentage of white Christians as the percentage of white evangelicals; he falls into the common journalistic fallacy of substituting the latter for the whole.)

His impetus for the book seems to be that Rauch has concluded that secular liberalism and some sort of Christianity need each other within American democracy -- and that white evangelical Protestantism has gone off the rails, transforming itself into a regressive political force. Well, duh!

He calls this situation a "cultural trade deficit."

Sometimes Christian America [he means white evangelical Protestantism] and secular America can rub along merely leaving each other alone. But sometimes they come into conflict; and when they do, they have positive obligations to make room for each other. ... Their bargain requires that the Constitution be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the well-being of democratic pluralism. The bargain is implicit, but America depends upon it nonetheless.

... America's demonstration that a country can be both devout and diverse, secular and spiritual, has been a historic achievement and a gift to the world. ... But the religious side has been less and less able to uphold its end of the bargain. ... A result is what I think of as a cultural trade deficit.  

... Look at it this way. Secular liberalism certainly promotes important values: tolerance, lawfulness, civic responsibility, equality, and so forth. But they are primarily procedural values, which orient us to follow certain rules. The legitimacy of those rules must come largely from outside of secular liberalism itself ... in practice, that has meant relying on Christianity to support the civic virtues. So we atheists rely on Christianity to maintain a positive balance of trade: we need it to export more moral values and spiritual authority to the surrounding culture than it imports. If, instead the church is in cultural deficit -- if it becomes a net importer of values from the secular world -- then it becomes morally derivative rather than morally formative. Rather than shaping secular values, it merely reflects them and thus melts into the society around it. ...

Yes -- one subset of Christians has replaced the way of the uppity itinerant peasant murdered by a vicious empire (that's Jesus) with the worship of Emperor Donnie. Many others, Christian and not-Christian, merely try to keep their heads down and wonder what became of values like decency, generosity, honesty and kindness.

Rauch gives an affirmative nod to the bargain Mormon officialdom has made with the existence of LBGT+ people in Utah. It's certainly interesting and better than what passes for a moral order in Texas -- or in the White House. I wish he had talked with someone other than the higher-ups of the Mormon church; at least in days past, LGBT people and anyone who was not a Mormon have often felt repressed where the Church of the Latter Day Saints sets the rules. Yet movement in the direction of pluralism must be good.

A strange book. I find it too confused to recommend -- and I feel confident that the confusion is not mine but Rauch's.

We live in a time when lines are being drawn. Confusion is a luxury. Evil is afoot. On the one side, the billionaires. On the other, everyone else and democracy and equality.  Once upon a time in this country, the moral evil which had to be repudiated was slavery. Today the lie which must be repudiated is that acquiring billions of dollars should give license to a few to rule the many.

That goes for Christians in all our diversity, for believers in other traditions, and for those who find their values through other sources. 

The Dishonor roll

Ten Senate Democrats threw away their only chance for relevance against Trump/Musk's fascist takeover the United States government by voting to advance a budget resolution which codifies the coup. Here's the list (reporting didn't make this easy to find.)

The Congressional procedure is complicated -- but "Chuck Shumer's cave" is on these 10 people.

Shaheen and Peters are retiring. The rest of them think they can put this betrayal of their voters behind them. Maybe they can. 

But what's the point of having them if they can't get off their knees? 

My ancestors risked life to end the reign of a king -- and they thought a bath of tar and feathers was the just deserts of traitors. We don't go in for such things these days -- but the traitors should have a very hard time if they think they can walk among their voters without being shouted down and shamed.

Friday cat blogging

 

When I came in dripping from moving the garbage cans off the street in the drizzle, they were standing by to superintend me. Thanks for the support!

Meanwhile, in heavily populated Golden Gate Park, a different sort of critter ambled along the margin of Blue Heron Lake, without regard for human observers.

Latinos in the USofA

If Kamala Harris had narrowly won the presidency, we'd be talking vigorously about this book, trying to understand why some Latinos shifted their party preferences in the vote. Since the Donald sneaked narrowly through to commit his ungoverned mayhem on the nation, most of us will likely miss it. But we shouldn't.

Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America by Paola Ramos is a lucid and affecting dissection of the fraction of the Latino electorate that has been drawn to Trump. Ramos, like her father Jorge Ramos, is a serious journalist. She's not spit balling when she delves into why some American Latinos are attracted to the right. The book is generous and fascinating, bolstered by the personal stories of her subjects who are her neighbors and more and more of ours.

Ramos explores three facets of Latino experience in this country: tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma.

Tribalism refers to the common trope in communities who experience exclusion from the "national mainstream," versions of "I want to identify with and as one of Them," however folks see the ruling class. Hence we get the life story of a Latino Border Patrol agent who succeeds indeed -- and then receives a nasty surprise about his own origin story. Traditionalism is represented by the Bronx beauty parlor owner who fears the Anglo society around her and looks to Trump to protect her. (No knock on hairdressers: I go to such a person to get clipped and she's very clear about which side of the class divide she and most of her Latino customers are on.)

The section on trauma did the most to open my thinking to what my neighbors bring with them from south of the border. The contemporary media environment enables them to subsist on the home country news in a way past immigrants might not have. During the pandemic, many imbibed Russian propaganda and disinformation that we seldom saw in English language sources. English speakers took in plenty of nonsense; new immigrants and Spanish speakers got an extra dose while shut away from the virus.

Ramos interrogates the history of Simon Bolivar, the hero leader of the overthrow of Spanish rule in the southern continent. His legacy is mixed.

Two things can be true at once. Simon Bolivar could have been both a liberator and an authoritarian caudillo. He could be a hero to some, an enemy to others. That seems a recurring story in Latin American history and politics, strongmen achieving "democracy" by way of authoritarianism. Or, rather, their own distorted version of democracy. ...

Democracies in Latin America are haunted by the shadows of strongmen. ...[For example] Nayib Bukele [in El Salvador] is simply the latest iteration of this dark legacy. ... Millions of people love Bukele. Millions of people want Bukele. They look up to him, not just in Latin America, but also in the United States.

She goes on:

For many Latinos, the purpose of being in the U.S. is to heal. To run away and escape from these wounds of the past. Yet the United States has a long history of exploiting the political trauma many Latinos carry -- particularly those fleeing communism and violence -- to score political points. ... American administrations have leveraged that pain, exacerbated it, and carefully weaponized it to their advantage. I thought about everyone who has been featured in this book ... So many of them don't appear to have healed from their wounds. ...

... America's foreign policy created fertile grounds for the steady rise of authoritarianism, not just in Latin America, but in our own backyard. It all comes full circle.

Ramos concludes:

The image America has of us doesn't necessarily translate into the image many Latinos have of themselves. Americans may see us as minorities, but many feel like the majority. They may see uses immigrants, but many feel like border vigilantes on the inside. They may see us as Black, but many feel white. They may see us as Indigenous, but many feel like Spaniards. They may see us as liberal on paper, but many feel conservative in their hearts. They may see us as people who value democratic ideals, but many yearn for the authoritarian strongman. The path toward finding ourselves in this country has never been linear. In our quest to find belonging in America, many Latinos are quietly oscillating between identities, spaces, and stories that are often disconnected and at odds with each other.

Latinos in this country are our future. That coming into demographic might has meant one trajectory in California and a different one in Florida. But what does it really mean? Ramos provides glimpses. There will be more.

• • •

For what it is worth -- not much but there will the more to come -- Latinos are rapidly becoming disillusioned by the Trump regime's record on "Jobs and the Economy" according to the YouGov/Economist poll. In January Hispanics gave Trump a favorable 41-36 rating; but late February, they were registering 32-58 disapproval. That's a -31 point swing in a month!