I suspect a hypothetical President Mayor Pete bent on payback with the new tools at hand could find a lot of red state pork to impound. An astronomical amount of it, especially in the defense and NASA budget.

But all this is scribbling in the margins in deficit terms.

So has most intersectional pap. The only reason most people give a fish about (distorted, misused and twisted) intersectional or DEI stuff is because it did the functional equivalent of escaping from its ivory tower and got into Know Your Meme. If it was still in its origin stage; a way for young minority academics to wrench tenure slots from the trembling withered death grip of ancient white academic; no one would care about it at all.

But, of course, they're kids. It was a bad bet for kids to enlist in every army action in history, they still did it because they were kids.

Heh that puts it only slightly below intersectionality in academic seriousness.

I guess so, yes. Or rather there's no need for the DEI omnicause (a pointy headed academic concept almost as idiotic as the idea of intersectionality being widely applicable to politics in general) to be employed to resist Trump. Each of Trumps feints can be directly opposed by those his given feint effects and it's neither useful nor practical for the entire greater Trump opposition to join in every single element of resistance.

Not surprising at all.

Sweet agnostic jebus! The stupid is so strong it burns!

I think the more likely win they envision is enacting the reverse santa claus dynamic that Republicans have been slavering after ever since the 90's: The right slashes taxes and blows up the deficit, then the Dems come in and slash spending to balance the budget, get blamed and usher the GOP back in to slash taxes again.

They just have an underpants gnome method of getting there which is a bunch of qestion marks in between "we do this and then the Dems meekly do that" which is why the right always explodes in bilious fury when Dems get into office and refuse to balance the budget through spending cuts.

Yeah this is the nub of it.
If Elon and Trump remain close then the Muskrats have little to fear since any Federal charges would easily be pardoned by Trump.
BUT
If they fish something up, or if Elon and Trump have a falling out or if they fish something up and Trump finds it advantageous to scapegoat Elon... well then all bets are off. It's not like Trump doesn't have a long history of throwing his subordinates under the bus.

But Jaybird is also right: none of these characters would be doing this stuff if they weren't strongly convinced they'll win. So the above analysis probably hasn't occurred to them and Elon is so self centered it probably hasn't occurred to him either.

It is a great deal for Trump, though. Elon and his minions take on the downside risk and Trump is insulated somewhat (but if they fish up one of the third rails that electrical arc will burn right through the insulation of separation that Elon provides.)

You keep switching over to projecting prescriptive analysis on me in your comments which is fine except that you, yourself, haven't laid any prescriptive cards on the table in your original article.

I'm down with talking prescriptive analysis if you want to but I think you should go first.

Your original post was descriptive, not prescriptive, so I confined my critiques to what I saw as flaws in your description.

I think you're looking at it incorrectly Jay on a basic level.

If Trumps -only- opposition were, say, the Democratic Party, or the Librul(tm) media then this "flood the zone" stuff could plausibly work and what you're describing could apply. This would be doubly true if only the Democratic Party, for instance, could materially oppose Trump. This would be triply true if controlling what "present public discourse" or "what we're talking about now" or even "Vibes" constituted victory. I can also see how you, or I, with us both being individuals who are not directly effected by Trumps myriad attacks and who are interacting with them only by the discourse or the vibe might say “holy cow, Trump is winning so much.” I, personally, equate this to various points in Putins early stage attacks on Ukraine when the Russians launched innumerable assaults from many different directions against many different targets. For a little while everyone was like “holy cow the Ukrainians are gong to get owned.”

This is not, however, the case in reality.

Each relevant impacted individual is both able and is incredibly motivated to respond individually to each of the myriad Trump attacks. Individuals who’re being illegally dismissed or sidelined have absolutely every motivation to file their complaints at court against these unlawful dismissals. Every group who’s having their funding unlawfully suspended or cut off has absolutely every motivation and every ability to push back. The court system across the entire country has a lot of dockets to hear these various cases.

The question, really, is if there’s some fundamental flaw in the legal analysis. That the executive has some obscure procedural right to do this astonishing, unprecedented wave of unilateral changes in government or to sanction these deranged and wild antics? The bet on the Trumpian/republitarian side seems to be that when these cases and appeals cascade up to the Supreme Court that some significant number of those justices will say ‘Ha-HAH! The time has come!” rip off their masks and reverse themselves on decades of conservative case law saying “suck it libs, it was all a ruse!”

It's theoretically plausible that such a thing could happen I suppose but I suspect that it won’t. I mean Thomas will do what he’s paid to do. He’s old, he generally doesn’t seem to give a fish. Alito, might maybe, ramble some circular nonsense and throw in with Trump, maybe. But the rest of the younger conservative justices? I don’t know it seems unlikely that they are entirely and on this subject and for this President willing to throw their entire ideology and reputation on a bonfire.

And all this stuff Trump is blizzarding out is predicated on him somehow, eventually, winning. If he doesn’t then he’ll get driven back in a blizzard of losses, punitive damages and reversals that’ll, in the end, cost the Federal Government more money and him more reputational loss than if he’d never tried it in the first place.

Of course, he could try to say “let the courts enforce their powerless rulings” and flat out do a constitutional crisis but that strikes me as un-Trumpian. When faced with concrete resistance he’s always historically folded. When committing his various venal crimes it’s always a sideways sidle, it always is oblique and full of posterior covering excuses and allusions. Flat out defy the courts and say “I’m King now?” It doesn’t feel like his MO.

So right now it seems to me we’re in the opening salvo of a blizzard of nonsense. “OMG there’re soldiers on motorbikes attacking our entrenched positions at 10,000 points across the line of engagement!” That’s right now. But it seems very possible, maybe even very likely that with a little time and fortitude, when the dust settles, it’ll become. “OMG we blew away all those idiots on motorbikes attacking our entrenched positions and now there’re 120,000 corpses on the flat land in front of us.”

And this is without even considering the possibility that Musk and his little platoon of coder idiots accidentally fiddles with the wrong line of ancient COBOL script and causes something integral, and hard to fix, and central to break and 71 million people suddenly wake up and aren’t receiving their social security checks for a couple of weeks. Or months. And that is the thing that all the republitarians exulting about “cutting the gummint the way them elected squishes would never vote to!” are trying to ignore. If Trump finds himself holding a fork that has the business end stuck into the outlet of social security or medicare? There’ll be an almighty ruckus and the smell of burning hairspray and then a shower of spray tan and that’ll be the end of Trump. And it’ll be red state voters who’ll be baying to hang him from a lamp post. Because owning the libs is one thing but if those gummint hands start grabbin at your disability or your social security check or suddenly meemaw or papaw needs to move in with you because they can’t make rent, well, owning the libs is gonna suddenly be a heck of a lot less important to you.

Surprise surprise.

Probably not. Whatever was said in public the Israeli's have had enough uncertainty about where the Americans limits were to be cautious about a lot of things. Even under Trumps previous term Trumps grasp of foreign policy was tenuous enough, and enough old GOP hands were around enough that the Israeli's weren't certain if they had a blank slate.

Well they'd say "We agree, which is why we don't want em." Hamas had absolutely nothing to do with the Jordanian civil war. Hamas wasn't founded until 1987 and the Jordanian civil war was in 1970.

Basically, pretty much the worst possible thing a friend could tell an addict friend.

Well, this isn't even about Hamas, it's about Palestinians in general.

I mean Egypt and Jordan really really really won't take the Gazan population in voluntarily. Jordan already suffered one regime threatening event due to Palestinian populations in their midst and Egypt is not exactly a stable government either to say nothing of how the Jordanians and Egyptian populations would absolutely hate it.

I don't think this is something Trump could cajole or browbeat either state into doing. It'd be like offering someone escalating dollar amounts to slit their own throat- there's not really a dollar amount that would do it.

I mean, the only scheme I could see potentially working is the Israeli's just start scooping up Gazans and ship them into Syria- the Syrian state is so nascent, weak and unstable they probably couldn't stop them. It'd be expensive, difficult, a humanitarian fiasco and morally abhorrent but logistically I suppose in theory they could do it.

Well the neocons mostly have been (rightfully) driven from the GOP due to Bush's adventures in the middle east. I am utterly delighted at the irony that Trump, who made his bones eviscerating Bush and the neocons fish ups, is talking about prancing off down the exact same path.

Trump must REALLY believe that Bibi held off on resolving the Gazan conflict to help out Trumps election chances* if he's grateful enough to even talk about doing something like this. Then again he did just talk to Bibi so that could simply be who is pulling his strings at the moment.

I do not, however, see how Trump could pull off going into Gaza without congressional buy in. It'd be expensive as fish.

*I'm agnostic on whether Bibi actually did but I do believe that Bibi is easily wily enough to suggest as much in private to Trump and that Trump is a big enough idiot to believe it.

Yeah Dune with all the mystical stuff eliminated just... well it was like a hollowed out eggshell.

Fair enough.

I'll note that the private market has failed to eliminate HIV so I fail to see why we could expect this program to do so.

Sure and if we were arguing about a proposal in Congress or in spending bill negotiations where this was a provision I'd say you're on solid ground but we're talking about an extralegal act of, I don't know, baseless vandalism?

I hear you saying you expect it will be overruled but don't you think it should be overruled?

I haven't, I don't follow the cinema closely, especially since my local one has ensh*ttified badly, and yes I'm aware that makes me a part of the doom loop of cinema but I was never a cinephile so my conscience is clear.

Right, so basically the demented republitarian billionaire running around the apparatus' of the Federal Government trying to close various elements down with just the fig leaf of an executive order at most has nothing at all to do with a backlash to some kind of similar or equivalent actions on the other side. Just that the woke indulgences of the late Obama on era are fourth order drivers of voter discontent with the Dems. I'd say, then, that my objection to Dark stands.

The academy is up its own posterior about social fads of the current day? I am shocked, shocked!