I Told You So
President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump, Wednesday, November 13, 2024, in the Oval Office. Also in attendance are , left, and Chief of Staff Jeff Zients. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
This is Thanksgiving week and I don’t plan to do a lot of writing since we will be having a house full of guests, but I did want to take a few minutes to say, “I told you so.”
Over the past few days, I’ve seen several conservative pundits who supported Trump lamenting the president-elect’s appointments. For instance, Erick Erickson recently wrote on his Substack, “Well, I have bad news. Donald Trump has picked a George Soros employee to be Treasury Secretary. Is this draining the swamp?”
My question to Erickson is “What did you expect?”
Erickson supported Trump despite pointing out himself in the past that Trump was no conservative. Trump really has no consistent ideology except for being anti-immigrant, pro-tariff, and favoring whatever is best for Donald Trump. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when he nominates Scott Bessent, a high-ranking officer in George Soros’s Soros Fund Management, as Treasury Secretary, liberal one-term Republican congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Labor Secretary, or Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Since the election, one thing that has been very apparent is that we are not dealing with the first-term Trump who listens to expert advice and is content to fulfill the ceremonial duties of president and play golf while traditional Republicans run things.
Trump-47 is shaping up to be a hands-on executive who is heavily influenced by right-wing punditry and social media. If you think that Trump is a competent leader, you may be cheering for that, but what it actually means is that America is getting a hodgepodge of faux expert talking heads and influencers. This is not going to be a conservative utopia. It’s going to be government by the comments section.
There is nothing unlawful or unconstitutional about this. As Chris Karr wrote earlier this week in his excellent and interesting piece on the spoils system of appointments, presidents get to choose pretty much who they want as officials in their Administrations. The onus is really on the voters to make sure possible Russian assets like Tulsi Gabbard by electing officials who will exercise good judgment in staffing the federal government. From time to time, the Senate rejects nominees or, like Matt Gaetz, a nominee withdraws when the lack of support becomes apparent, but for the most part Congress is a rubber stamp for the president’s appointments.
And on top of that, Project 2025 is rearing its head once again. Trump disavowed Project 2025 during the campaign but has appointed several contributing writers from the project to his new Administration. These appointments include Russ Vought, one of the chief architects of Project 2025, to head the Office of Management and Budget.
Political campaigns are not known for their honesty, but Trump’s 2024 campaign (and Trump himself in general) was far removed from integrity and transparency. That’s not a great way to start a four-year relationship with the American people.
The icing m the cake is that Trump, the purported peace candidate, is actually considering military action against Mexico. World Politics Review reports that sources in the Trump campaign are seriously considering bombing or sending troops to attack drug cartel targets south of the border. This would be an act of war against a friendly nation.
If it isn’t apparent yet that voters did not choose wisely in 2024, just wait. Trump hasn’t even begun to implement policy and his neophyte picks to head government agencies haven’t even begun to throw wrenches into the gears of government. I don’t think that giving internet and cable news hotheads the reins of government will prove to be a good idea, but America has chosen to embark on that experiment so we’ll see.
“If I wanted George Soros and Randi Weingarten to be cheering on the presidential administration, I’d have voted for Kamala Harris,” Erickson continues.
Maybe not, but that’s what you’ve got. And with Kamala Harris, you’d probably at least have competent and proven administrators to head these departments.
We get the government we deserve, and to use an H.L. Mencken phrase I’ve used before and will probably use again, we are about to get it good and hard. For the 51.1 percent of the country that did not vote for Donald Trump, that is unfortunate but those are the joys of democracy.
For those who did vote for Trump thinking that The Former Guy’s return would bring peace, prosperity, and competence, it’s sad to say but he made you his Thanksgiving turkey.
Great perspective.
Can’t wait for the dude on here who penned “The Case for Trump” to chime in.Report
Second Trump Administration = America’s FAFO years. We got to coast from 2017-2021 because our institutions were strong, at least to start with. Here’s hoping they haven’t been eroded too much since then.Report
The biggest difference in the two terms, I suspect, will be the SCOTUS is prepared to make drastic changes to the rules.Report
Yeah it was truly shocking to watch how the conservatives on the SCOTUS, completely insulated from anything Trump could do to them, decided the way they did.Report
You will be waiting a LONG time for that. Koz rarely eats crow publicly, and frankly he is likely cheering the chaos.Report
My main take is that he could have named every single member of the Cheney family down to the 2nd and 3rd cousins to the administration and NeverTrumpers would complain about it.
You could ask the NeverTrumpers for a list of names and then if Trump nominated that list of names, they’d explain that it was indicative of Trump’s mendacity somehow.
“He’s trying to lull *REAL* conservatives into a sense of complacency! How come he hasn’t banned abortion entirely and called for the death penalty for unmarried women who have sex under the charge of conspiracy to commit attempted murder?!?”
So Donald Trump’s picks are too liberal, it seems?
Are they “reaching across the aisle” too liberal or just “too liberal for people who created RedState” too liberal?
Because I’ve met people who would complain if you brought donuts into work because they weren’t breakfast burritos.Report
Sure, I mean the never Trumpers aren’t placatable because they have good reason to think Trump will be a disaster (especially for conservativism as they conceive of it) regardless of Trumps surface actions and based on his past performance.
That being said let us not make the repeated mistake of thinking that never Trumpers matter which is, actually, a much deeper statement then it seems at first blush since it’s a mistake that Dems have been making since Obama’s first term. To elaborate in 2011 when Obama was negotiating with the GOP over their debt limit hostage taking his operating theory was that the neocons (who would become the never Trumpers) were both serious, influential and spoke for a material voting constituency. Based on that misconception Obama made a deal that’d set up negotiations for a balanced budget and impose across the board cuts if those negotiations failed. The theory was that the neocons would never permit the negotiations to fail because blanket cuts would hit defense spending, neocons sine qua non. Of course if the neocons ever did command a constituency it was destroyed by W and the right merrily blew through those negotiations and the sequester was imposed.
This story repeats in 2016 when Hillary, among her various missteps, tried appealing to neocons on trade and security grounds along with repeatedly incredulously saying “Trump is awful!” much the way the neocons did in the primary in 2015. The neocons, generally, either endorsed HRC over Trump or forswore their former neocon positions. That didn’t, however, deliver any significant votes. This story repeats again in 2024 when Kamela embraced Liz Cheney and emphasized her support and doubled down on the “Trump is a menace” themes in an effort to reach out to the Nikki Haley/Neocon voters and, again, came up empty in terms of actual voters.
The moral of the story is pretty straight forward: neocons don’t command a significant voting constituency. Yes, they have lots of monied supporters and an outsized presence in online fora and media discourse but they, like their libertarian cousins, command virtually no actual voters. You can’t get blood from a turnip and you can’t get material quantities of votes by appealing to neocons. It’s a mirage. It is invoked by the right oppositionally as a stick to beat anyone not on the right with but there’s no devotion there, no votes. It’s just a phantom.Report
Yea, I would build off this and say there’s really two things going on. Part of it is that the neocons, the never Trumpers, etc. are an on paper (or online) only phenomena. And as much as I appreciate David’s posts a lot of them rest on the false premise that there is a conservative opposition to Trump of any significance. There isn’t, no one has buyer’s remorse (yet). The people saying these things are in a separate sort of wilderness they may never emerge from and no one cares one way or the other if they do.
The second piece of this is that there really still is a bipartisan failure to grapple with the disastrous GWOT. There are some really serious things wrong with the intelligence agencies, the blob, etc.
It’s a strange set of circumstances that has made them a de facto Democratic constituency, and a really difficult one to take on at that. At the same time the Trumpian response to the situation is to say ‘Yea they’re failures, and you know what we do with failures? We put f*cking idiots in charge of them.’
It’s a bad dynamic and I’m not sure how we break it with the current alignment.Report
Well how we break it is to recognize it for what it is. The neocons have to be treated like, say, libertarians or other experts who represent no voting constituency. So you can listen to their opinions in their areas of expertise but you don’t treat them as representing significant voting constituency so you only use their expertise instrumentally rather than ideologically. Biden didn’t actually do badly foreign policy wise, I don’t think one can easily make the case that the neocons were actually dictating policy in his administration.
Where their influence is malign is in that trying to appeal to their imaginary constituency ate up far too much campaign time, language and bandwidth. It’s political opportunity cost more than anything.
But yeah, grappling with the GWOT is an interesting subject because everyone left of center feels it’s viscerally unfair. We all remember being opposed to W in his idiocy and getting flamed for it in the aughts. So the idea that we, his opponents, have to answer for his idiocy feels fundamentally unjust. That Bush’s people were punished by quite literally losing their party, voters and becoming politically homeless is cold comfort to us, his former opponents. But the GWOT is just the largest example of a more blanket failure of expertise to both screen for ideological blind spots and to handle communicating with constituents correctly and that’s not something we on the left can plead innocent on.Report
I agree with you. I also think Biden’s foreign policy was overall solid, and a Biden that was 10 years younger may have been able to kick the ball in a very constructive post GWOT direction.
The needle that I think is tough to thread is distinguishing the neocon pundits and writers from the permanent bureaucracy in the pentagon, the CIA, etc. To me we are the side for whom skepticism of these organs of the state should come most naturally. Yet trying to both give them the aggressive reform they need while also defending the larger principles of rule of law, democratic norms, the need for institutions to work in certain non partisan ways across transitions of partisan power ends up coming off as incoherent. Or at least it is really easy to paint that way, despite there being no inherent contradiction between our basic system being good and certain actors within it being in pressing need of reform.Report
Yep, well stated, It’s tough. And yeah if Biden hadn’t been so fishin old. I’m still going around and around in my head on if he was a blessing or a curse in 2020.Report
2020 – Blessing
2024 – Curse
And how the Dems weren’t able to stick DJT with the too old label, I’ll never know. Maybe it’s just that they’re that bad at dirty politics.Report
Maybe the folks most inclined to use the attack were the same ones who pointed out how Biden was 100% fine and the evidence otherwise was composed of “cheapfakes”.
If you’re defending Biden against the “too old” attack until the second he drops out, it’s difficult to sell the whole “but Trump is too old!” thing.Report
Honestly, I was kind of astounded Biden threw his hat in the ring this year. I had him pegged for a one termer, for sure. The guy had a pretty decent career in public service, and appears to be a fairly nice guy. He could have gone out on top.Report
It’s weird looking back at the year, huh? There were a handful of people who said “if Biden is the candidate, he’s going to lose” and the response was not “I know, therefore we have to do something” but irritation and the jerks who kept pointing it out.
Huffpost is now reporting that Harris internal polling never had her ahead either.
If the Democrats wanted to win the most important election of our lifetimes, they should have had an open convention, I guess.Report
I dunno; Republicans seem to have no trouble with cognitive dissonance.
No, strike that.
VOTERS seem to have no trouble with cognitive dissonance. The issue is Republicans are able to capitalize on that fact while Democrats aren’t.Report
When it comes to the pivot from “There is nothing wrong with Biden’s age, you’re an ageist!” to “Trump is too old!”, making it requires the ability to overcome cognitive dissonance but laughing at it requires zero effort.Report
Ah yes but the curse in ’24 is married to the blessing in ’20.
Like, with Captain Hindsight parked firmly next to me I ask myself “Would Klobuchar or Pete truly have failed to catch on in a race with Biden not ever in it? Would the Dems truly have nominated Bernie and lost?” and from there “Could only Biden have passed the IRA and CHIPS act or managed Ukraine or the Afghanistan withdrawal (which was remarkably good regardless of what the whiners whine) as well as he did?” Or, at my darker moments, “Would it have been so awful for Trump to fish things up for four more years and for the GOP to be utterly landslided out in ’24 as would have clearly happened?”Report
“Like, with Captain Hindsight parked firmly next to me I ask myself “Would Klobuchar or Pete truly have failed to catch on in a race with Biden not ever in it? ”
(Sanders was even with Biden until those two dropped out 18 hours before the Super Tuesday poll.)Report
I remember it well and Uncle Bernie did quite well in the states running up to South Carolina. But that was a race with Biden in it. Would Bernie have simply waltzed to victory in a race with no Biden ever in it or would the support he tied up have gone to a younger moderate lane candidate? Or would other moderates have run. Of course counterfactuals are almost impossible to noodle out.Report
The Muslims in Michigan seem to have buyer’s remorse based on the leader of them begging for Biden to do something about Netanyahu. I’ve seen reports of big ag kindly asking Trump not to deport their workers. That is a type of buyer’s remorse.Report
I think that time may come. At minimum it’s hard to see how we return to the economic situation of 2019 with the policies proposed.
But it’s hard for me to believe there’s already any kind of widespread second guessing by his supporters. He hasn’t even been sworn in yet.Report
Oh, I don’t think that there is widespread second guessing by most of his voters yet. There are only a few showing buyer’s remorse. That being said, if the tariff goes through it will be a disaster.Report
Yes, continue to blame the Muslims in Michigan despite the vote in Michigan not actually being any different than any other comparable state. Dastardly Michigan Muslims voting in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Report
Men + College are the only ones who stepped up.
Put the blame where it belongs: Men Without College and Women.Report
“continue to blame the Muslims in Michigan…”
dude, he isn’t *blaming* them.Report
Surely I can’t be the only one who has noticed that we’ve moved from Trump being Hitler and Democracy Itself being on the ballot to Trump being too much like Harris, right?
I mean, I wouldn’t mind doing the whole transitive property thing and saying that Harris is also Hitler (seriously, I’d have a blast!) but I think it’s a lot more likely that people are just saying things.Report
Who is this “we” who have actually “moved?” A bunch of different people are saying a bunch of different stuff, but I don’t see many people moving from A to B, just a lot of people who have decided to talk about B without ever having talked about A.Report
So now we’re talking about “B”.
Where “B” is… “Trump isn’t as Republican as we’d like”?
“Trump is showing his True Colors: He’s a New York Democrat from the 90’s”?
“So-called ‘Conservatives’ should be really upset with Trump”?Report
You didn’t answer the question, you just restated your original point.
To recap: Who is “we” and did whoever this we is or are previously talk about A and have now “moved” to B, or is it just a different bunch of people talking about a different bunch of stuff?Report
You’re right. The Trump == Hitler people have not shown up in this comment thread.
The people who argued “A!” are not here.
We’re now arguing “B!”
Where “B” is… “Trump isn’t as Republican as we’d like”?
“Trump is showing his True Colors: He’s a New York Democrat from the 90’s”?
“So-called ‘Conservatives’ should be really upset with Trump”?Report
I’ll show up here, and I haven’t moved on. (I will be kind and not bother to explain it being fascist doesn’t make Trump ‘Hitler’ or even a Na.zi… it just makes him a fascist.)
Are we simply not going to talk about Trump promising to use the military against the ‘radical left lunatics’?Report
Who’s we? And, frankly, after my entire life being spent listening to righties say that every opponent was both Hitler and Stalin and Democracy itself being on the ballot why on God(ess?)’s green earth is it at all interesting if some similar language flew from left to right?Report
It’s like Spinoza. Substance monism, just with Hitler.Report
Tried googling Spinoza and Substance monism but came up empty in terms of it being relevant as far as I could tell; so still have no idea what you just said or if one of your kitties just walked across your keyboard and hit enter.
Or is this just an oblique way of saying that only non-republicans have agency?Report
It’s a way of saying that every politician is Hitler. (Every *THING*, for that matter.)
It’s not that the person pointing it out is wrong.
It’s that it’d be true no matter which politician you pointed it out for… which makes it true but uninteresting.Report
I mean is being involved a failed putsch Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is running on Blood and Soil nationalism Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is talking about an ethnic group poisoning the nations blood Hitlerian? Objectively yes. It’s not particularly contested that Trump did all of those things so the people calling him Hitler have at least one leg to stand on.
That the left lost to him and now is obeying the laws and proceeding with a legal transition is also not hypocritical. Trying to overthrow the will of the voters is Hitlerian and the left isn’t Hitlerian. Jaybird of not long ago would wearily sigh and comment on the game being iterated.
Meanwhile the rights constant and decades old tradition of Stalinist and Hitlerian name calling of Dems remains generally baseless. So you seem to be saying everything is Hitlerian which just seems to be a sophisticated BSDI but, no, both sides don’t do it.Report
I’m okay with just Trump being Hitler too.
Saddened, I suppose. But it’s okay.
At least we have *ONE* commenter who thinks that Trump is Hitler in comments.
I thought we had zero.
In any case, I was under the impression that if Trump was, in fact, Hitlerian, that it would put obligations on us, as Good Germans, to be our own Bonhoeffers.
Yes, the game *IS* iterated but if one of the players is Hitler, we know what that game turns into.
Is Thomas Matthew Crooks our Bonhoeffer?
Personally, I don’t think he is.
And the fact that I don’t think he is acts as a personal red flag for me when it comes to the whole Trump = Hitler thing.
Because if it’s absurd that Tommy Crooks is Bonhoeffer, it’s worth taking a look at whether it’s absurd that Trump is Hitler.
But maybe we’re all in our own little Cabaret, doing our best to be our own little MC in our own little private Weimar.Report
What? That is the strangest thing I have ever heard you say. No one has a moral obligation to assassinate anyone. (Even in some magical universe where a) it was trivial to do that, and b) would work at stopping anything instead of just devolving it to the next in line and making him a martyr.)
What being under fascism morally ‘requires’ us to do is to _not comply_, as best we can. To recognize evil is being done and not help it. (Bearing in mind our own personal safety.)
I literally pointed this out in a post here the other day: There are people here who are on the fence about, say, immigration. Or trans rights. Or whatever.
But some really _really_ bad stuff is about to happen to a bunch of people, and we don’t need people standing there helping that stuff, even in the most minor ways.
When the Na.zis are asking you about your Marxist neighbor, you don’t make a complain about how he plays the radio too loud at night and once punched you for complaining about it. Even if it is true. He’s a perfect neighbor, you never had any problems with him, you don’t even think he’s a Marxist.
Same with policies. Maybe before, you had some level of national pride and thought maybe it would be nice if Poland was part of Germany again. But, uh…look. You don’t think that anymore, or at least you don’t _say_ that anymore, because that allow the Na.zis to claim that you support them.
On of the rules about fascism is, under it, you have to think before you speak. That’s usually understood to mean ‘or you might be in danger’, but it’s just as ‘or you might put others in danger’. Either by directly putting them in danger, or by, even slightly, supporting what is happening, or even supporting some lesser version of what is happening.
To quote Toto: What do you mean ‘We,’ white man?
I’ve mentioned it before: The right has horrific operational security. Because they assume the authorities are on their side, so the very very few times the authorities are not (like storming the capitol), they are made to be utter fools.
The left has op-sec, because the authorities have never been on their side. You don’t know what they’re doing.Report
You’re familiar with the old saw from the War on Terror days, right?
“A Muslim extremist wants to kill you. A moderate Muslim wants to point you out to a Muslim extremist”?
Good times.
Anyway, I’m now wondering if a Good American Extremist and a Good American Moderate now hold those roles.
What should our attitude toward little Tommy Crooks be?
Because I submit: If we’re embarrassed by little Tommy Crooks instead of investigating whether he was Catholic and starting the whole Beatification ball rolling, we’re lying to ourselves about whether we’re really in the Hitler Ballpark.
And I have no doubt that bad things will happen to many of the undocumented visitors who found themselves, magically, visiting undocumentedly and who will be unceremoniously Martha’s Vineyarded.
But the residents of Martha’s Vineyard wanted to get rid of 95% of those visitors (keeping the domestic help) and, so too, it looks like the rest of the country is simpatico to that.
Worse than that, they find the accusation that we’re in the Hitler Ballpark to be laughable.
Even as they prepare to sing the national anthem.
(Oh, by the way, 2026 is coming up. The 250th Birthday, baby! Lee Greenwood is still alive, for the record.)Report
“You’re familiar with the old saw from the War on Terror days, right?”
mehhh, bro, that was a long time ago bro, you’re still talking about that?Report
Jaybird, I’m not playing along anymore. When people repeat lying Republican talking points, I’m just going to say ‘Those are very blatant and disproven lies as part of Republican anti-immigration rhetoric’ and just stop.
I don’t have time to argue against Republican lies anymore. None of us actually do.
And I don’t care if anyone finds the accusations ‘laughable’. Even pretending you were not blatantly lying about the reactions of Martha’s Vineyard and who did what (Which you are), all _that_ indicates is that Hitler stuff is going to be _easier_ because more people want it.
Yeah, and a good chunk of German’s supported Hitler too. Really good point you’re making there, I guess, where you pretend fascism can’t be fascism if some random selection that everyone pretends is on the left side sorta want some of the bad things the fascist government is going to do. Yeah, Jaybird, that’s how it works!
I do not give a flying f*ck about who thinks things are ‘laughable’ at this point. We are not actually in the realm of politics anymore, we are in the realm of protecting minorities.Report
You’ve heard that remigration has begun already, right?
It’s like if the Martha’s Vineyard undocumented visitors got on a bus themselves before the 46 hour mark and left before the papered residents themselves could get rid of them.Report
Yes, Jaybird, and there were plenty of trade unionists who fled Italy when it was clear that Mussolini was consolidating power in the 1920s. Good catch, way to point out additional comparisons with what is about to happen.
(I could have made a different comparison, but I feel that Jaybird has completely forgotten we have other examples of fascism, because he’s too focused on the ‘Trump is not literally Hitler’ game. (He also has forgotten which side the Catholic church was on during all that.))Report
Also: Why the hell do you think assassinating Trump would accomplish _anything_? What are you even talking about? Anyone assassinating Trump would be _disastrous_ for stopping this, especially if it was part of some left plot to stop his political goals. (Of course, they’d just lie about it and blame the left if it wasn’t them.)
Do you literally not understand how the executive system works in this country and who would be in charge after that? Hint: It would be someone with the exact same fascist goals who is more competent.
Do you literally not understand why creating martyrs is bad?
Do you literally not understand why giving a government with fascistic tendencies and view of the world a very obvious reason to present to the country for declaring martial law and crack down on the left would be bad?
Would this result in a very small level of infighting? Yes. But this infighting would happen _on top of_ of innocent people, as fascists tries to prove they were more fascist than each other and they could crush the outgroup more than others. We already have state governors doing that. We know what happens.Report
I didn’t say Trump was Hitler, I said he has exhibited Hitlerian behavior which is, again, pretty uncontroversial. But Trump isn’t Hitler, so far, and the US is not Weimar Germany. Just the same as how the people who got conned into being shipped to Marthas’ Vineyard were not driven out but instead quite happily left and went to the places they actually wanted to go.Report
…They were literally driven out.Report
I have a sneaking suspicion you mean “driven out in cars or other vehicles” which, har har, but you know that I meant forced/compelled against their will or interests to leave.Report
They were, to a man, taken to Joint Base Cape Cod within 46 hours.
This is something that happened.
A few months later, a few came back to provide domestic help to the residents of Martha’s Vineyard.
Seriously, this is nuts. This is something that actually happened and we all watched it happen in real time.Report
Yes, and the fact that some went back means that more could have gone back -if they’d wanted to- but they didn’t want to go back to Martha’s Vineyard so they didn’t. It wasn’t some ethnic cleansing.Report
Where are you hearing “Trump is too much like Harris”? I have not heard that.Report
It’s in the original essay above.
Here, I’ll copy and paste this:
Report
You realize that’s a quote by Erik Erickson, right?
A person who voted for Trump and presumably does not think he is Hitler.
The left is criticizing Trump for speaking like an authoritarian or a fascist (and, as we have apparently all forgot at this point, been revealed to have tried to act at various times but people around tried managed to dissuade him during his first presidency. Apparently we’re supposed to pretend that the second time is going to be just like the first time, despite the fact we have learned how many times he hit the guardrails the first time, that are no longer going to be there.)
The right is attacking him for not being conservative, which is also a… I mean, I guess it’s a valid point, I don’t care, the fact he’s promising to do horrific things to outgroups is slightly more important than who he’s decided to put in random government positions, but whatever.Report
So you agree that it is a quotation that exists?Report
*sigh*
You are all over the place, Jaybird. You utterly fail to actually state your thesis so no one actually understands you, you make broad generalizations that you then have to pick strange examples of.
And you’re wrong: Erik Erikson never thought Trump was Hitler, _even when_ he was a Never Trumper and refused to vote for him.
Erikson’s problem with Trump was his _moral failings_, his character. Erikson made it from a position of being A Christian (TM), a claim that a man who is so patently immoral should not be president. He made that incredibly clear at the time. It had nothing to do with Trump’s Hitler-ness.
So, would you like to try again, and find a Never Trumper that claims Trump is Hitler (Or, at least, an authoritarian, as absolutely no one alive is Hitler, Hitler is dead.)
Anyone, find one who said that and who now is complaining about how his picks are too liberal?
And preferable find one that didn’t change his mind and stop being a Never Trumper way back in _2020_, as Erikson did, which also undermines your point somewhat. But that’s not a requirement.Report
My original thesis is at the very root comment.
We’ve got a bunch of Conservative Types who are complaining that Trump’s picks are too liberal.
My original questions follow:
If we’re complaining that people didn’t want to talk about that and I started running with what people did want to talk about, I can only plead “Guilty”.
So to deal with your questions…
We’ve got a handful of people who were complaining that Trump is in the Hitler Ballpark.
Right? We’ve got that, right?
Well, the OP is not engaging with the Hitlerian thesis at all. It is, instead, that Trump is selling the Nazis out.
He’s nominating people that the Nazis are disappointed with.
Go up! Read it! It’s the “I Told You So” post! It exists!
We’re in this weird place where we’re casually discussing how disappointingly liberal Trump’s picks are!
SURELY I AM NOT THE ONLY PERSON NOTICING THIS.Report
I think the problem is the original post — it seems to be aimed at a very small number of people, none of whom post or comment here (and David himself rarely joins the discussion to his posts, if ever). It’s also rather confused, mixing up a quite premature “i told you so” (except maybe to the one or two people on the planet who thought Trump would make conventional Republican appointments) with a plausible “just wait and see”.
I saw a post a few days ago talking about how so many reactions to the election sound like a guy whose girlfriend just dumped him for another guy, and this one fits that model — “I can’t believe you left me for him!! You’ll be sorry!”Report
Some charity is advised, many of these kinds of writers we host would be auditioning for the pages of National Review a decade or two ago. Now they’re here with us.Report
I wouldn’t ordinarily comment on these, but in this case it seemed to me to be dragging down the conversation.Report
Wait, you meant _us_? Yes, Jaybird, the focus of discussion _here_, on Ordinary Times, is extremely weird. It’s a place for disillusioned libertarians and conservatives to argue with neoliberals, with a few very random outliers, and thus is actually kinda silly.
Now, in Trump’s case, the entire political system is being extremely silly at this point. The discussion of ‘exact policy decisions’ around the guy who ‘has asserted he going to use the military against his political enemies’ and ‘is a multiple convicted felon who tried to commit a coup’ and ‘is about to tank the US economy which will help solidify his and his billionaire friend’s power’ is hilariously stupid, it is indeed the last scene of Cabaret before things go Really Bad, and it’s utterly insane to pretend we are having politics as normal.
But this site isn’t going to magically realize that, considering that the actual media hasn’t. Maybe I’ll make an ‘i told you so’ tour in about a year.
But as for this _post_: As North pointed out, this entire post is aimed at Erik Erikson and other conservatives who thought Trump would be as ‘normal'(1) this time as he was last time.
This is…no one here. Absolutely no one here thinks Trump is going to be ‘normal’ this time. I don’t think anyone here thinks he was normal _last time_, but if they do, they certainly don’t think it will happen again. This article is aimed at no one here.
1) Which, to be clear, last time he was not actually ‘normal’, but he did have some conventional appointees, because some of the people surrounding him were normal Republicans and/or the National Review. The ‘grownups in the room’. Those people are gone this time, and thus he will no longer have ‘normal people’ unless they are appointed to positions that no deranged person willing to suck up is asking for.Report
Well, for *MY* take on Trump’s picks, it seems like he has a bunch of wild cards in there that seem to be acting as pre-emptive test balloons (Trump now knows the Junior Senator from Utah’s name, for example), some names that have gotten some Democrats to announce that they’re pleased with the pick (Fetterman said that he’d vote for Rubio, for example and there’s the inexplicable support for RFK Jr. from Colorado’s state government), and some picks that we knew were probably in the mix such as Tom Homan who, apparently, worked for Obama? In charge of Deportations???
Surely Obama didn’t know. Surely Obama would have chosen someone less likely to be nominated by a Trump.
Anyway. At this point, I’d say that Trump’s picks are well within Trumpian tolerances for how “surprising” they are.
The only one that made me wrinkle my brow saying “I didn’t see *THAT* coming…” was Linda McMahon for the Department of Education (she helped wind down WCW, I guess).
But, other than Gaetz, they’re all more-or-less unsurprising-given-it’s-Trump.
And the only people who seem to be actively disappointed with his picks are people who are comparing Trump not to Hitler, but to Harris.Report
It’s almost as if ICE was _always_ a bunch of fascists, a bunch of racist thugs with no accountability who locked people up with basically no process or recognition of their civil rights, and that fact was almost entirely ignored by the American people because the victims were brown and had accents, and that was true under both Republicans and Democrats. And thus the actual fascist regime needs to change almost nothing about how it works, and the people who were appointed to that position in the past will have absolutely no objection to doing that Trump wants.
What an interesting and novel idea that I’m sure is not any sort of mainstay thought on the left.
ANYWAY.
LOL. Yes. The only people disappointed with minutia of Trump’s government are the people who think there is a chance that Trump’s government will a) act like a normal government and not the completely random mess it will be, and b) do policies that they even vaguely approve of.
The rest of us really do not care, except to the extent that various appointments weakens his government.Report
Well, we’ve got a Hitlerian President who is using some of the guys used by the Hope/Change guy and who is disappointing the Redstaters.
Which tells *ME* that we’re not in Hitler territory but, like, “Yet another Republican got elected” territory.
“But he’s Hitler!”
“Yeah, so was Romney, McCain, Bush, Dole, Bush, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, and, let’s face it, ‘Eisenhower’ is a kind of German name, when you think about it.”Report
Fascists often disappoint Christians (Despite using them to get elected), what an incredibly silly point.
Hey, Jaybird, just for fun, what exactly _would_ make you think we were in fascist territory?
Like, name a specific thing.
I actually thought we all agreed that ‘having a brownshirt army attempt to overthrow the results of an election by violence’ would be one of those things, but apparently not.
Do you actually have any defined line that crossing is correctly called ‘fascism’?
Also, do you think that someone who has been elected but not taken offer promising to cross those line should correctly be described as fascism even if they are not in power yet?
Feel free to google what ‘fascism’ is, because you seem really hung up on Hitler and whether someone is or is not him. Fascism does actually have a pretty clearly defined set of traits, and none of them are ‘lead by Hitler’…in fact, the actual origin of the term is not from anything Hitler did, but developed in Italy by Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini.
Also, fun fact, Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, and thus _no one_ living is him. We just know that from basic knowledge of how long humans live.Report
Hey, Jaybird, just for fun, what exactly _would_ make you think we were in fascist territory?
Redefinition of words on the fly.
Mass censorship.
Lawfare.
Debanking.
And some severe hardcore “othering” of people who merely have been believing the same stuff they believed a couple of decades ago.
Also, something like a mythical “Great Reset” movement to fundamentally change stuff.
If I found myself smack dab in the middle of a situation like that, I imagine that all sorts of my inner klaxons would be going off.
Feel free to google what ‘fascism’ is, because you seem really hung up on Hitler and whether someone is or is not him.
*I* wasn’t the one hung up on whether someone was or was not him.
*MY* take was that, last month, we had one. Then we had an election. And now a bunch of the “HITLER!” people are shrugging and saying “we’ll get him next time” as if Democracy itself was not on the ballot. As if it were just another election and Trump was just another politician who happened to win one.
As if it were a ploy to drive votes rather than a statement reflecting the internal state of the speaker.Report
That is literally not part of fascism at all. That is, in fact, from a science fiction book. (Incidentally, being sci-fi, it also was just a _guess_, both at how political movements will evolve and how language works. It is not great at the first, and gets the second completely wrong.)
That’s just authoritarianism in general. China has mass censorship, but is not fascist. I was specifically looking for fascist signifiers.
I wouldn’t make a point of this except that you seem very determined to argue the exact definitions, so I feel it’s important to get this exactly correct.
For the record, how do you feel about what happened in Turkey? Where the censorship, which does exist, is pretty thin and not particularly important, the control of information there is simply done by the fact that the regime and supporters completely own every media outlet. (We do all agree that what is happening in Turkey is a form of fascism, right? Let’s not quibble if neo-fascism is different from fascism.)
This isn’t even vaguely an aspect of fascism, I have no idea where you got this from. It’s not even an aspect of authoritarianism.
This is an oddly specific thing that might happen under authoritarianism, but it happens as a side effect of other things.
Also, by that logic, the US was a fascist state until the mid-70s when women could finally get bank accounts. Is that where you are going with that?
It sure has been interesting to watch you attempt to twist this question to score political points.
That is literally the _opposite_ of fascism. Fascism almost always make claims of a past in which everything was better, and how some recent change has made things worse, and we should return to the imaginary past. (Both ‘recent’ and ‘change’ are, of course, very subjective and often outright lies.)
Fascism does not assert it wants to ‘fundamentally change stuff’, it assert it wants to ‘unchange’ stuff.
It really is interesting to watch you, a person who constantly complains that ‘the left calls everything they don’t like Hitler’, to, uh, call everything you don’t like fascism. Fascism is a specific, fairly well-defined political philosophy. It isn’t just ‘stuff you don’t like’, hell, it isn’t even the same thing as general authoritarianism or dictatorships.
—
Also, wow, if we were to pretend this was an actual list instead of you twisting a bunch of nonsense complaints about the left, that is a really stupid list. You didn’t include extremely obvious things like ‘killing political rivals’. Or even ‘stopping the peaceable transfer of power’. You don’t think those would put us in fascist territory? You really don’t have any actual lines?
To quote our future president: Sad.
Would you like to try again, listing _actual_ things Trump could do that would make you consider him a fascist (Feel free to just lookup what he’s promising to do.) or should we consider this conversation over?Report
You didn’t include extremely obvious things like ‘killing political rivals’.
Oh, yeah. There were attempts to kill politicians, weren’t there?Report
Under fascism, the government, or their brown shirt proxies, do kill political rivals. Or, even better, frighten them from speaking or being in public, which removes them from politics without having to take the heat of killing them.
And, yes, there was an attempt to do that here, where the Proud Boys (One of the brown shirt armies working with Trump) attempted to kill certain members of Congress during Jan 6, along with the VP. It’s unclear how serious this attempt was.
(It’s also unclear how directed that was by the president, but that’s exactly how brown shirt armies function. The fascist leadership merely hands them a target, without saying they want anything to happen, and the brown shirts go and destroy that target. Trump is actually notable bad at this and often says the quiet part out loud)
Anyway, I guess you’ve give up on actually writing down any _real_ lines, which means you conveniently get to keep saying it’s not fascism no matter what happens. Cool.Report
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy (wiki)Report
You must be new here.Report
Hey, have you noticed that the “Trump is Hitler” people have shown up?
(Do you ever find yourself vaguely irritated when you pull the “is anybody here arguing X?” ploy and then, a few hours later, someone shows up to argue X?)Report
I think our political class lacks the language to describe what Trump really represents, which isn’t fascism so much as a combination of illiberal democracy and corruption, falling somewhere between Silvio Berlusconi and the kind of Latin American strong man that loots what he can and mismanages the finances, but lacks the ideological commitment or competence to create and empower death squads. Why get your hands dirty over abstractions when you can make you and your friends and family rich(er) instead?
This kind of thing is bad and it can and should be opposed. However it cannot ever be defeated by anyone that has on some level internalized the idea that small-l liberal democracy is an artificial edifice covering for white supremacy or genocide or whatever other form of oppression, expressed in the most histrionic ways possible. They will lose because everyone knows that they are craven, cynical, and a different flavor of stupid and corrupt. And if we’re going to be governed by stupid and corrupt regardless, we might as well pick the most entertaining of the options, that says he will fight for you instead of they(/them).Report
Why do you think that Trump will not be able to find people competent enough to create and empower death squads this time?
The only reason he failed last time is that he surrounded himself by more normal people who worked for him who were utterly horrified by what he was trying to do, and stopped him both by distracting him and doing things that, honestly, we’d call insubordination and be horrified at in any other circumstances.
That isn’t going to happen again.
Incidentally, the government part of fascism doesn’t start with government death squads. It starts with general propaganda and propagandist laws aimed at riling up violent mobs that oppose the ‘enemies within’, but whose actions can be disclaimed as brave patriotic warriors who are outraged by the situation.
And, of course, arresting the opposition and media.
Hey, for fun, google ‘Kash Patel’.Report
Trump’s current choices do not seem that competent but supremely loyal. That being said, you really don’t need that much competency to do a lot of damage.Report
DavidTC: Why do you think that Trump will not be able to find people competent enough to create and empower death squads this time?
My strong expectation is we will make it through the Trump presidency without any attempts to create death squads (like last time).
My other strong expectation is whoever the GOP picks to run as his replacement will face similar accusations.Report
Stop crying wolf.Report
Technically, McDonald’s is bad for you.Report
I think the classic term for this is kleptocracy, government of thieves. That being said, I think that contemporary liberalism has a communications problem and a consistency problem. Defining a broad universal liberalism that defends the choose your own adventure path to life has not been easy. Many liberals have adopted a “we must fight for the wretched of the earth” worldview that makes it easy for the global right to present liberalism as being more concerned with small subaltern groups than humanity or the citizenry in general.
Too many liberals are also addicted to the jargon that has come polluting in from academia and activism. It’s why you get people who insist on using the word Latinx despite Latinos hating it. They learned this term in college damn it and it is right.Report
Yea it’s a fundamentally faulty vision of the world. When even the people you claim to be standing up for increasingly disagree that is the case it’s time to rethink things. Well passed time really.Report
You oppose it by insisting on good government.
However huge parts of the “liberal” agenda are opposed to good government.
Government unions hit the radar as corrupt out of the box. Ditto insisting that equality of outcome is a thing the gov should be enforcing.
Big parts of the country view Trump as less corrupt, or only as corrupt, as Team Blue.Report
Agreed.Report
It seems they have, which falsifies your original idea about “we” having moved. It was just a different bunch of folks talking about different things all the time. Now another bunch has shown up to talk about something else.Report
I live about one mile from the border of what was Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s congressional district. No one here thought she was a “liberal.” I made myself unpopular with a group of friends when, back during the very nasty campaign, I described her as “a pretty generic Republican.” If you want to see a “liberal” in Congress, look to her successor.Report