Metaphor for the day:
A sign of hope, a final solution to what ails the planet?
Carry on regardless ...
The pond has noted any number of times how impossible it is to keep up with the news of the Cantaloupe Caligula and what his minions are up to... but he has invigorated scribblers everywhere ...
The pond thought that rather than regurgitate the latest news - like the orange turd's most recent displays of his devotion to Vlad the sociopath - it could regurgitate some of the musings on the mango Mussolini.
Parker Molloy:
Cue Parker Molloy, offering in her Substack Stop Analyzing Trump's Unhinged Ideas Like They're Normal Policy Proposals, The New York Times just ran 1,200 words gaming out the electoral math of forcibly annexing Canada. We're in trouble.
This was pleasing to the pond because it didn't just do over the MM, it did over the NY Times' coverage.
The pond has nothing against Peter Baker - he presents on MSNBC as a rather gormless nerd, a fitting companion to a sharp New Yorker scribbler of the Susan Glasser kind (civil ceremony please) - but Molloy cruelly pinned him to the wall like Nabokov handling a butterfly ...
Sometimes a piece of journalism is so wildly off-base that it perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with political coverage. Today's example comes from the New York Times's Peter Baker, who decided to treat Donald Trump's delusional ramblings about annexing Canada as a serious policy proposal worthy of electoral analysis.
Molloy offered the header as an example in her coverage of the coverage crime...
Here's how Baker opens his piece (relax, the original link to the Times yarn can be found in the archive):
As President Trump looks north and repeatedly presses his case to absorb Canada as the "51st state," politically minded Democrats who are otherwise outraged by almost everything else about his agenda find themselves contemplating a potential electoral boon should it ever happen.
Few in Washington take the prospect all that seriously, of course. Canada has made clear that it has no interest in joining the United States, and Mr. Trump seems unlikely to send in the 82nd Airborne Division to force the matter. But if the idea appeals to Mr. Trump's grandiose sense of himself as an empire-building historic figure, it could also undercut his own party's prospects.
Few in Washington take the prospect all that seriously, of course. Canada has made clear that it has no interest in joining the United States, and Mr. Trump seems unlikely to send in the 82nd Airborne Division to force the matter. But if the idea appeals to Mr. Trump's grandiose sense of himself as an empire-building historic figure, it could also undercut his own party's prospects.
This is journalism malpractice.
Let's be clear about what's happening: The President of the United States is openly fantasizing about forcibly annexing a sovereign nation of 40 million people. He's been repeatedly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "Governor Trudeau" and threatening our closest ally with absorption into the United States. This isn't a policy proposal to be analyzed; it's the ravings of a dangerous authoritarian.
But instead of treating this story as what it is — evidence of Trump's increasingly unhinged worldview and contempt for democratic norms — Baker decides to play electoral college calculator. He walks us through detailed scenarios about House seats and Senate majorities, complete with expert quotes about the Democratic Party's theoretical gains. It's like writing about the thermal properties of the emperor's new clothes while ignoring his nakedness....
Let's be clear about what's happening: The President of the United States is openly fantasizing about forcibly annexing a sovereign nation of 40 million people. He's been repeatedly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "Governor Trudeau" and threatening our closest ally with absorption into the United States. This isn't a policy proposal to be analyzed; it's the ravings of a dangerous authoritarian.
But instead of treating this story as what it is — evidence of Trump's increasingly unhinged worldview and contempt for democratic norms — Baker decides to play electoral college calculator. He walks us through detailed scenarios about House seats and Senate majorities, complete with expert quotes about the Democratic Party's theoretical gains. It's like writing about the thermal properties of the emperor's new clothes while ignoring his nakedness....
And so on, no need to copy more, the links are there for the curious.
The Bulwark:
Instead the pond turned to Jill Lawrence in The Bulwark, a reliable haven for students of Trumpism... Seven Myths Shattered by Trump 2.0 (and One True Thing) Watching Trump, Musk, and their band of arsonists set fire to the shining city on a hill.
The entrée...
The voters who chose Trump last year because of his business prowess must have forgotten about his six bankruptcies, hundreds of stiffed contractors, $25 million Trump University fraud settlement, and terrible reputation among peers. Maybe they have an affinity for the racism, cruelty, and misogyny he brings to politics. Maybe they like presidents who grift off their supporters, encourage insurrection against their own government, or bury their first wife at their golf club. Or maybe they were upset about egg prices.
Maybe they feel like Musk’s money, or the 13 children he’s had with four women, make him a real man. Maybe they think he’s really smart to start his rampage at eleven agencies engaged in “more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions” into his six companies, according to a New York Times investigation.
And maybe they are surprised by what is happening, as lives are upended all over America and the world. Except, what did they think would happen?
Cut to the dot point chase which led - spoiler alert to - the closer...
American dream, alive or dead?
YET ANOTHER REPUBLICAN MYTH, the myth of the perfect dealmaker, imploded. And I could go on. How about these? (And try not to laugh.)
- Presidents have limited power and must not overstep. For Republicans, including many of the conservative judges and justices they have installed, this clearly applies only to Democrats. If Obama or Biden had tried a power grab led by an unelected government contractor using immature twentysomething tech bros to destroy agencies created by Congress, fire thousands of civil servants willy-nilly, and access private taxpayer and employee information, all without any oversight or disclosure, we’d be awash in hellfire, brimstone, and articles of impeachment.
- Tax cuts pay for themselves. This doesn’t happen. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts were followed by tax increases starting with him and ending with Bill Clinton, who achieved a balanced budget and a debt-reduction trajectory. George W. Bush and Trump threw that away and launched us into frightening levels of debt. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts not only are adding a projected $1.9 trillion to the deficit over ten years, more than 80 percent of the cuts went to corporations, tax partnerships, and people with high net worth. Workers saw very little benefit and black taxpayers saw even less. But Trump wants to renew his tax cuts, which expire at the end of this year.
- Presidents should obey the law, defend the Constitution, and uphold their oath of office. Also, Trump and Musk are champions of free speech. (Okay, now I’m the one laughing.)
- The American dream is about self-determination—people free to chart their destinies and follow their dreams. Except of course if you are a transgender teenager who needs health care, a woman who needs an abortion, a refugee fleeing violence, or anyone else who doesn’t conform to the expectations and requirements of leaders obsessed with money and power.
Here’s one true thing, no myth:
America is indeed an exceptional nation—exceptional in this current moment for the selfishness and cruelty of its leaders, their willful ignorance of recent history (from systemic racism to Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union), their rejection of pluralism, and their determination to make 330 million people speak, think, and live as they say.
Trump and Musk have set fire to “the shining city on a hill.” The only mystery is whether it will survive the flames.
The Bulwark, de nouveau:
Keeping up with The Bulwark keeping up with the arsonists at work is incredibly fatiguing ...
Just look at today's offerings (Oz time).
There was William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Will Selber offering The Cruelty Isn’t the Point. It’s the Pleasure. Trump 2.0 is a shared sensual experience in hurting other people.
After Egger's did the sadism angle, Kristol covered the sadism in action in Betrayal, Again:
One may have thought, for one brief moment, that perhaps the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, once an eloquent voice for democracy and freedom, might resign in protest. Of course he did not. He followed President Donald Trump’s orders. He hurried off to Riyadh to try to arrange the betrayal of the brave people of Ukraine and the victory of the dictator Vladimir Putin.
The British historian Simon Schama commented, “The photo of Rubio sitting opposite Lavrov in Riyadh will forever be fixed in the historical album of infamous capitulations.”
So will the video of Rubio speaking to the press after the meeting, where he gushed that this was a moment of “incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians geopolitically, on issues of common interest, and frankly, economically.”
The United States has no need to “partner” with Russia economically. But President Trump wants to partner with Putin’s Russia morally and politically—against Ukraine, and against liberal democracy.
The American president is on Putin’s side.
Trump made this perfectly clear a few hours later, in his press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion: “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” And he made clear he’s going to make a deal—one that amounts to a capitulation—regardless of Ukraine’s wishes. After all, Trump said yesterday, “Russia wants to do something. They want to stop the savage barbarianism (sic).”
Ian Bond, a former British diplomat accustomed to speaking diplomatically, was brutally frank: Trump’s remarks were “some of the most shameful comments uttered by a president in my lifetime. Trump is siding with the aggressor, blaming the victim. In the Kremlin they must be jumping for joy.”
Ukraine’s President Zelensky understands the situation. “It seems like Russia and the U.S. are preparing an ultimatum to Ukraine, talking about Ukraine without Ukraine,” he said. “We didn’t accept ultimatums in 2022, when the situation was much more serious and nobody was helping us, and I have no intention of accepting any ultimatums.”
Nor should he.
And nor should we.
The immortal Rowe:
And so on ... with the immortal Rowe providing an echo of all that ...
The Bulwark, Encore:
Selber did Afghanistan, and there's always a nice screen shot as a cheap shot ...
Every other story at the top of The Bulwark page was about the deeds of the Mar-a-Lago Mafia shakedown man and his minions...
And a lot of them were outside the paywall,be it Mark Hertling's We’re Negotiating with War Criminals
No amount of diplomatic palaver can paper over Russia’s record of kidnapping Ukrainian children, executing POWs, and targeting civilians.
Orbe it Adrian Carrasquillo's When DHS Sends Your Son to Gitmo or Sam Stein's The DOGE Brain Drain Has Begun ...
The Atlantic:
Exhausting, which is why the pond turned to Lora Kelley in The Atlantic, talking about minion Musk in DOGE’s Fuzzy Math, The department’s current efforts—and Musk’s obsession with fraud—are not likely to make a dent in the country’s deficit. (archive link):
Last week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the national debt “one of the biggest betrayals against the American people,” suggesting that Americans’ anger about debt “gave birth to the concept of DOGE.” The idea that Elon Musk and his band of government-efficiency crusaders can bring down the debt is a tidy one. But DOGE’s current plans would hardly put a dent in the deficit.
Musk has lamented that America is “drowning” in debt, which has indeed ballooned over the past decade: As of this month, the federal debt is $36 trillion, about $13 trillion higher than it was five years ago. Debt has not been a priority of either major political party for some time, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economics, told me. And despite Taylor Greene’s claims about American anger over the debt, it’s not a top-of-mind issue for people at the polls, either, Annie argued.
If Musk’s team were serious about reducing the deficit, it could explore some unpopular but effective options: reduce spending for the military and the entitlement programs that make up the bulk of the federal budget—Medicare and Social Security—or simply raise taxes, Annie suggested. Instead, what Musk and DOGE have done thus far is ravage government agencies and departments (USAID, for example, which makes up a tiny portion of the budget, and the destruction of which won’t lead to major savings). They’ve also focused on slashing the federal workforce by offering buyouts to 2 million federal workers (and, over the weekend, axing thousands more federal-agency employees); so far, salaries for the workers who have accepted the buyout offer make up a minuscule portion of the national budget in total.
Musk, Trump, and their allies have also turned to a bit of magical thinking, claiming that rooting out fraud in the government is the key to saving money. In a meandering address from the Oval Office last week, Musk claimed without evidence that USAID workers were raking in millions in kickbacks, and that people as old as 150 were claiming Social Security benefits. He wrote on X last week that “at this point, I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.”
Stumbling upon, and reclaiming, trillions of fraudulently spent funds would be rather convenient, and crying “fraud” is a useful way for Musk and his defenders to cast DOGE’s actions as in service of the American people. Trump has touted this same shaky logic, asserting that uncovering a bunch of fraud could mean America has less debt than previously thought. Fraud does exist in parts of the government: Some people intend to defraud government programs; others accidentally sign up for benefits they’re not actually eligible for. And the government does sometimes make payment errors—federal agencies estimated that more than $200 billion was lost in fiscal year 2023 because of such mistakes, and in past years fraud losses accounted for 3 to 7 percent of the budget. But there is no evidence that lowering the deficit is as simple as tamping down on fraud—or that fraud exists to the extent Musk claims.
Plus, by whacking the bureaucracy, Musk and his team are weakening programs that are already working to tamp down fraud. All federal programs have fraud-detection mandates. The Treasury, for example, announced in October that it had recovered or prevented $4 billion in fraud losses in the prior fiscal year, in part from employing AI machine-learning. And as he rails against what he calls fraud, Musk and his associates have effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose mandate is to crack down on fraud in businesses (and which might have regulated Musk’s own companies).
The rhetorical trick of politicians referring to unpopular or disliked government spending as fraud isn’t new. But in an era of rampant scamming, claiming that the American government is swindling its own people hits on a salient national fear. Musk’s first few weeks running DOGE don’t bode well for his ability to solve the debt crisis. He may succeed, however, in further eroding trust in government, which could give him and his team even more leeway in their attempts to dismantle it.
The Atlantic, de nouveau:
Of course those numbers and calculations have already changed, and so the pond turned to this interview in The Atlantic (archive link for the full version):
The Hidden Costs of Musk’s Washington Misadventure
Max Stier wants to improve the government. Elon Musk’s campaign against civil servants is making it worse.
By Franklin Foer
As the Trump administration widened its campaign against the civil service, my mind kept turning to an old source, Max Stier, who has earnestly devoted his life to making government work better. Like his great passion, the bureaucracy, he’s relatively anonymous. In 2001, he founded an outfit called the Partnership for Public Service, a name that suggests an almost lyrical devotion to the gritty stuff of government. His organization is a font of ideas for making bureaucracy more effective. Over the years, it has trained thousands of government employees and helped agencies devise modernization plans.
Hoping to understand the damage that President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have managed to inflict, I called Stier this past weekend. What was he telling the civil servants who were calling him in a state of panic? Because he is levelheaded and committed to a nonpartisan agenda, I trusted him to deliver a measured assessment. That he seemed so profoundly alarmed was itself terrifying. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Franklin Foer: I’m sure your phone is constantly buzzing. What are you hearing?
Max Stier: I’ve fielded calls from Forest Service workers in Idaho and health-care workers in Georgia. It’s important that people know that the bulk of civil servants are not in D.C. Eighty percent of the feds are outside of D.C. They’re in every community in our country—and they used to be in a lot of communities globally too. Some people have been chased away. Some people have been directly fired, largely illegally, or put on administrative leave or sidelined. But there is no part of the workforce that is immune from this profound distraction and fear.
Read: It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans
Foer: Okay, survey the totality of the wreckage for me.
Stier: There is just a series of hammer blows that have been wielded against the civil service. The so-called deferred-resignation offer is their attempt to create a stampede out the door, to make it easier for them to get rid of the apolitical expert civil service. And then, on the other end, they’re creating a system that enables them to politicize the hiring and the management of the workforce. Certainly there are parts of our government—and most obvious ones, like USAID and the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that are taking it on the chin even harder. Some of the most frightening things are happening at the FBI.
Right now, we’re seeing the destruction of infrastructure, but also a culture that focuses on the public good and the commitment to the rule of law. What we are going to see next is the use of government authority that is possible because that culture has been eradicated—the use of government authority for improper purposes. And so when you think about what’s happening, for example, with prosecutors who were fired because they investigated or prosecuted January 6 rioters or the president himself, these events foretell the use of government authority to pursue a personal agenda and to go after perceived enemies.
One other point: Sometimes even the media describes this as an effort to cut costs. This is not an effort to cut costs. This is going to cost the American taxpayer and the American public in huge ways.
Foer: Wait, explain that to me.
Stier: If you really wanted to reshape the federal workforce, you would start with an actual investigation of all the talent that you have—and then all the talent that you need. You would develop a plan. But what they’ve done is a random exercise. They are going after people without any sense about whether they’re the best performers or the poor performers. It’s probably a little worse than that: The people who may be the most talented have a larger propensity to leave, because they’ll have more options.
And the administration is creating liabilities. It will now owe money to people who are put on the sideline for no reason, and it will have to fill gaps that are created that they don’t even understand, which will mean eventually going out to hire contractors. There will be lawsuits—and lawsuits that are meritorious. Guess who pays for that? The American taxpayer is going to be funding the defense in those cases and will pay the payoff. If your intent were to shrink the workplace in a cost-effective way, this is a crazy way to do it.
Foer: But that’s the Silicon Valley way—moving fast and breaking stuff.
Stier: That may or may not be a smart strategy in Silicon Valley. It is not in the government, because there are real consequences. People get hurt in a different way when public capability is broken. One of the challenges in our government is that when it tries to modernize technology, it has to build up a new system alongside the legacy system. That’s how it manages to keep functioning.
Our government is about creating good outcomes; it’s not about throughput. So the objective is wrong here. The public sector has accountability, transparency, reliability issues that are simply not the same as in the private sector.
Foer: All the focus has been on DOGE, understandably. But what does the focus on Musk leave out?
Stier: Most democracies count their political appointees in the tens, not the thousands. We have a government where there are 4,000 political appointees that a president makes. That’s a vestige of the spoils system that actually creates a lot of grief. Only 1,300 of them require Senate confirmation. The remaining appointees are a bit invisible. The public isn’t seeing that they are the ones doing a lot of the damage right now.
Worn out already?
The cracking Crace in the Graudian:
The cracking Crace took time away from his UK political sketch to do a sketch of King Donald:
Even by his recent standards, Tuesday night’s stream of unconsciousness from Donald Trump took some beating. Hot on the tail of excluding Ukraine from the first round of peace talks with Russia and in effect threatening to withdraw the US from Nato, the Donald has now suggested it was Kyiv who started the war with Moscow.
More than that, he declared President Zelenskyy’s popularity ratings had slid to just 4% in his own country and that he had assumed the role of dictator by not holding elections. He ended by claiming that the US had given more than three times as much aid to Ukraine than the rest of Europe combined. You could almost hear Vladimir Putin cheering from the sidelines. He couldn’t have written the script any better. It was perfection.
It goes without saying that everything the US president had said was complete doggy-bollox. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 and seized Crimea. There was then a pause in hostilities before Putin invaded a second time almost exactly three years ago.
Claiming Ukraine started the war was like believing that Poland invaded Germany to trigger the second world war. Or maybe the Poles were just suffering from false consciousness and were yet to understand they wanted to be subjugated by the Germans. Hell, maybe Trump thinks “no means no” is just some politically correct wokery and that when the Ukrainians said they would rather not become Russian what they were really saying was: “Yes, please. Do what you like.” Much like the Americans were gagging for the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor in 1941.
That was just the start. Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy’s approval ratings were 4% were just his delusional, senescent fantasies. The real figure is 57%: about 10% higher than the Donald’s own. And no one in their right mind is suggesting Ukraine holds elections while the war is ongoing. There again, Trump is clearly not in his right mind. His aid figures are also way off. Collectively, Europe has given Ukraine £132bn since the start of the war. America has given £114bn.
While a shrink would have a field day trying to untangle the workings of the Trump psyche – is he a narcissist or solipsist? Does he actually believe what he says or do his words have an independent existence to his brain? – it’s left to the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Much as they might like not to, other world leaders have to find a way of engaging with him. The Donald is the most powerful man on the planet and whatever he says counts for something....
The cracking Crace eventually returned to the UK to record Boris:
..The strangest response came from Boris Johnson. With Kemi Badenoch and other senior Tories strangely silent, the disgraced former prime minister popped up on X to offer his analysis. Trump was just doing his best to end the war. No one cared more about peace than the Donald. The US president had never meant for anyone to take him seriously about Ukraine starting the war or Zelenskyy’s popularity ratings. It was just his way of trying to get everyone round the table. His funny little ways. As with Boris, Trump could only be trusted to tell the truth half the time. The trick was trying to work out which half was which.
Boris ended his tweet by suggesting that Russia was desperate to have its assets unfrozen so it could hand them over to rebuild Ukraine. To think, Johnson used to consider himself Ukraine’s biggest ally. Right now, he sounded suspiciously as if he had morphed into another Kremlin sycophant. He will certainly be off Zelenskyy’s Christmas card list.
Ah, Boris, Boris ... exhausted already?
The New Yorker:
What about Emily Witt's piece in The New Yorker? Where Do Trans Kids Go from Here?, In the wake of Donald Trump’s executive order banning transition-related care for minors, hospitals in blue states began cancelling appointments—forcing families in New York and beyond to consider whether even liberal cities are safe (archive link).
Is it any wonder that Kyle Chayka came up with this for The New Yorker?
Infinite Scroll
The Second Trump Administration’s New Forms of Distraction
The first time around, the President’s bad deeds galvanized people on social media. This time, they’re looking to “flush out their brains.”(archive link)
Kyle Monson, the founder of a creative agency, felt overwhelmed by the news in the aftermath of the 2024 election. So he and his wife turned to binge-watching the reality series “Vanderpump Rules,” which follows a rambunctious crew of waitstaff around a Los Angeles restaurant, as a distraction—“to flush our brains,” he told me. The two were not previously reality-television devotees—they usually prefer higher-concept streaming dramas such as “Silo,” on Apple TV+—but they were drawn to the show’s pleasingly low stakes. It’s “a bunch of people making bad choices with no actual bearing on our lives, or any kind of impact on the world,” Monson said. In the early days of the second Trump Administration, as the new-old President and his associates have sought to dismantle large swaths of the federal government, I’ve heard similar expressions of retreat from people who had previously been paying close attention to the news. Despite the severity of DOGE’s upheaval, there is a desire to tune in to something unrelated. My informal survey asking what such distressed-but-disaffected Trump opposers were distracting themselves with turned up other reality-TV shows including “Survivor” and “Culinary Class Wars” as well as nostalgic rewatches, such as the original “E.R.”
Others have taken up more analog practices: playing drums, crocheting, reading Irish literature. Carly Eiseman, an artist in Los Angeles, returned to an activity she had taken up at other moments that she felt in crisis, including after 9/11 and during the George W. Bush Administration: sewing together patchworks of vinyl-album sleeves. “I’ve also found myself organizing and listening to a lot of records to try and be offline and not doomscroll,” she said. The need for immersive distraction seems to rise in tandem with how relentless the news is.
Well yes, but it's not just how relentless the news is, it's how relentless the pundit coverage is at the moment.
There's the collateral damage to cover, like Isaac Chotiner's interview with William Shoki, Make South Africa Great Again? How the country’s post-apartheid politics may inform the world view of Elon Musk and Donald Trump (archive link)
The relentless coverage is like being in the grip of YouTube logarithms dragging train crashes and car smashes in front of addicted eyeballs.
The NYRB:
Head off to Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB and you'll cop an extended consideration in From Comedy to Brutality, With his designs on Greenland and Gaza, Trump has signaled that his first term’s outlandish gestures are the second term’s savage demands. (Relax, there's an archive link for the addict).
Speaking of immersive distraction, O'Toole understands that the best way into a reality TV mogul is by way of the flicks, which produce some kind of flickering light, as he rehashes some of the early storylines:
In the 2020 disaster movie Greenland, the hero John Garrity (played by Gerard Butler), his wife (Morena Baccarin), and their young son are in a truck driving north from the United States into Canada. We hear on the radio an announcement from NASA:
"A nine-mile-wide fragment larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs will destroy most of Europe upon impact, causing seismic events that will generate one-thousand-foot-high tsunamis and nine-hundred-degree surface winds traveling faster than the speed of sound. Within hours, all of the continents will be on fire as the impact’s molten debris rains down from the upper atmosphere."
The family manages to get on a small plane heading for Greenland. As they fly, Garrity dreams of a verdant homeland of lush groves and sprinklers watering the lawn where his wife and child are playing—the lost America from which they are now refugees. He wakes to the sun shining through the window. Then, like Noah on the ark, he spies land: “Look, see it!” An ice-mottled peninsula, its shoreline washed by a glittering sea, comes into view. A glacier gleams on a craggy, snow-topped mountain. There is more drama with hurtling meteoric fireballs and a crash landing. The family runs to an American air base and, with the military personnel and the other survivors from the plane, finds shelter in a huge underground bunker just as the asteroid is about to obliterate Europe.
The screen fades to black. Then we see scenes from the incinerated world: the white of the Sydney Opera House turned a sickly gray by its coat of ash; a twisted and decapitated Eiffel Tower leaning precariously over the dusty traces of Paris; streetscapes that look like the recent drone footage of Gaza or Los Angeles. After what we understand to be the passage of nine months, the doors of the bunker open and the Americans shield their eyes from the dazzling sunlight. Chirping birds fly over the sublime landscape. The survivors emerge into their new New World: Greenland. The next American century begins here.
On January 15, five days before his inauguration for his second term as president, Donald Trump initiated a phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, that was, perhaps aptly, described by the Financial Times as “fiery” and by The New York Times as “icy.” The Financial Times said that Trump “insisted he was serious in his determination to take over Greenland” and quoted a European official describing the call as “horrendous.” A former Danish official said, “It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs” if it did not agree to sell the vast Arctic island to the US. The Danes—long-standing and loyal allies of the US—are, according to another source, “utterly freaked out by this.”
Just over a week earlier, in a show of monarchical and dynastic power, Trump’s princeling Donald Jr. had landed in his father’s plane emblazoned with the TRUMP logo in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. He claimed that he and his party were “just here as tourists.” But his father undercut this denial of greater ambitions, posting on Truth Social:
"Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!"
He later told reporters that he would not rule out using military force to seize Greenland.
These events shed some light on the nature of Trump’s second coming. For a start, they mark a transition of Trumpian modes from comedy to brutality. According to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021, buying Greenland was an idea Trump acquired from the cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder. But it was not regarded within his first administration as anything other than a flight of fancy:
After an early Oval Office meeting where Trump expounded on buying Greenland, one mystified cabinet member was struck by the delusional nature of the president’s speech on the matter. “You’d just sit there and be like, ‘Well, this isn’t real.’”
O'Toole covers a lot of turf, but the pond came to life again when he went there...
Of course, of course, it's just like the pond correspondent sharing a fantasy of Rupert actually being Orson Welles playing Hearst in one of the pond's favourite movies of all time, Citzen Kane.
How astute of Fintan to beat the drum with the pond's other favourite movie of all time:
What is new, however, is the fusion of different apocalyptic visions, one religious, the other techno-utopian. The annexation of Gaza by a Christian America appeals to the belief among some fundamentalist Christians that the conversion of the Jews in Israel will set in motion the end times and therefore hasten the Rapture, in which they themselves will ascend to Heaven. The acquisition and development of Greenland dovetails with Musk’s Martian fantasia: Trump, in his inaugural address, pledged that “we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Thus is Musk’s infantile obsession launched into orbit around Trump’s own colonial reveries.
This Martian mission in turn shares a genealogy with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which the title character is a caricature of Wernher von Braun, the Nazis’ leading rocket scientist, who went on to work on the American ballistic missile program and on NASA’s space missions.
And Fintan also throws in a Braun novel, and a novel detail about the source of Uncle Leon's name, before the MM began renaming him:
According to Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, his unusual first name was inspired by Project Mars, a novel Braun wrote in the immediate postwar years. Braun describes the political system of the colony:
The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
In the novel, the colonization of the red planet is part of God’s plan to create the Übermensch, whose development was cut short by the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. It is “a mission whose ultimate object was planned by God Himself” to bring together “the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism.”
All of this may be insane, but it is a necessary insanity. How else is it possible for Trump and his followers to reconcile his seeming determination to speed up climate collapse with his declaration of a new golden age? In his inaugural address, Trump evoked climate-driven disasters in North Carolina and Los Angeles, showing special sympathy for members of the elite who had been victims of fires “raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don’t have a home any longer. That’s interesting.” Yet he simultaneously promised to extract “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth” and stop the transition to a carbon-free economy.
Nonetheless, “the future is ours, and our golden age has just begun.” The last time we heard this was in Boris Johnson’s inaugural speech as British prime minister in July 2019: “We will look back on this period, this extraordinary period, as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.” That prophecy has not worn well, and even at the time it seemed ludicrous. But it is an obligatory form of nonsense in contemporary reactionary discourse. It offers the escapist promise of a future that does not match any imaginable version of the burning world we actually inhabit.
The DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis told Isaacson that during a visit to the SpaceX factory after the two men met in 2012, Musk explained that “his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilization collapse.” The preserved consciousness would, of course, be that of elite men like himself—as Strangelove explains of the underground world to which the US president and his highest officials, along with civilians selected for their “necessary skills,” will escape when nuclear war begins. “Naturally, they would breed prodigiously,” aided by the provision of ten women (selected for their sexual attractiveness) for every man. As a bonus, “there would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!”
The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
In the novel, the colonization of the red planet is part of God’s plan to create the Übermensch, whose development was cut short by the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. It is “a mission whose ultimate object was planned by God Himself” to bring together “the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism.”
All of this may be insane, but it is a necessary insanity. How else is it possible for Trump and his followers to reconcile his seeming determination to speed up climate collapse with his declaration of a new golden age? In his inaugural address, Trump evoked climate-driven disasters in North Carolina and Los Angeles, showing special sympathy for members of the elite who had been victims of fires “raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don’t have a home any longer. That’s interesting.” Yet he simultaneously promised to extract “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth” and stop the transition to a carbon-free economy.
Nonetheless, “the future is ours, and our golden age has just begun.” The last time we heard this was in Boris Johnson’s inaugural speech as British prime minister in July 2019: “We will look back on this period, this extraordinary period, as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.” That prophecy has not worn well, and even at the time it seemed ludicrous. But it is an obligatory form of nonsense in contemporary reactionary discourse. It offers the escapist promise of a future that does not match any imaginable version of the burning world we actually inhabit.
The DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis told Isaacson that during a visit to the SpaceX factory after the two men met in 2012, Musk explained that “his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilization collapse.” The preserved consciousness would, of course, be that of elite men like himself—as Strangelove explains of the underground world to which the US president and his highest officials, along with civilians selected for their “necessary skills,” will escape when nuclear war begins. “Naturally, they would breed prodigiously,” aided by the provision of ten women (selected for their sexual attractiveness) for every man. As a bonus, “there would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!”
Just to make it compleat, just to make it Henry pluperfect, Fintan turns to the Romans:
The golden age is described by Ovid in his Metamorphoses as an impossible past in which there was no need for laws because everyone behaved sweetly and no need for work because the earth, bathed in a perpetual springtime, was so abundant. What happened to this paradise in the Christian tradition is that it was transported from earth to Heaven. It became a posthumous location—you have to expire before you get to inhabit it. As a political promise about the future, the golden age is a lightly secularized version of pie in the sky when you die.
And this afterlife is best lived in after-places. In the Trump/Musk phantasmagoria, colonization is temporal as well as spatial. It is the “post” in postapocalyptic. New spaces—a warming Greenland or Gaz-a-Lago or Mars ruled by the Elon—will be new beginnings where, as Strangelove guarantees, there will be “no shocking memories” of the horrors in which the old world died screaming. That is why these places must be unpopulated, scarcely populated, or depopulated. The slate must be clean.
This insanity runs deep, but it is important to understand that there is also method in the madness: imperial fantasies create the conditions for an imperial presidency. This latter phrase—coined by the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker—gained wide currency in the dying days of Richard Nixon’s deranged second term, when it served as the title of Arthur Schlesinger’s best-selling book of 1973. The imperial presidency whose history he traces is one that leverages supposed foreign dangers to justify domestic tyranny. In 1793 James Madison warned that “war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” International adventures, he wrote, inflate the persona of the president and unleash the “strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity.” Five years later Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”
There's more, much more, as Fintan tries to cope with the insanity, tries to understand the madness and the hubris.
The pond could manage only one last gobbet before retiring exhausted (spoiler alert, it's the ending):
Legalized lawlessness is a good fit for the hybrid nature of Trumpism’s second coming. The MAGA movement has to manage a contradiction between the libertarian, antigovernment ideology of its Big Tech wing and the despotism of the fascist traditions on which it draws. The solvent is a kind of anarcho-authoritarianism that divides Americans in the same way that Western empires divided humanity into citizens of the motherland (who have rights) and subjects of the empire (who do not). For now “real Americans” are the citizens and migrants are the subjects.
This is why one of Trump’s first acts, on the night of his inauguration, was to sign an executive order that seeks to uproot the fundamental concept of American citizenship by ending the automatic entitlement to it of all those born on US soil. In doing this he is forging his own paradox—the American foreigner, the nonnational native. “Colonial subjects,” writes Elkins, “were effectively stateless people,” and that is exactly the condition to which Trump intends to reduce millions of Americans. And as Hannah Arendt showed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, once people are rendered stateless they are also “rightless”—“the scum of the earth” to whom anything can be done.
The immediate victims of legalized lawlessness in Trump’s America will be migrants. This is where the imperial presidency will first exercise its unrestrained authority. Trump has internalized the foreign danger that Madison warned could be used to make a president a monarch—the enemy is already fully within. And thus there must be, alongside the fantasy of postapocalyptic colonies, a shadow empire of extraterritorial camps into which migrants can be decanted: Guantánamo Bay, El Salvador, and what Trump says are “numerous, many” other countries. One of the minor outgrowths of European imperialism—the penal colony—is to be the main event of Trump’s revived version. Clearing a postapocalyptic Gaza of millions of people may be, at least for the moment, as The New York Times put it, “little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” but it sits in that head alongside a much more intimate form of ethnic cleansing in America itself. Imagining Americans fleeing a global catastrophe to Greenland helps prepare the way for a forced exodus of other Americans to bleak and barren futures.
Yes, even the National Review, akin to the pond visiting a garbage dump and holding nose:
Even more telling? Head off to the National Review (that enabler of weiros and prize loons), and you'll find Jeffrey Blehar trying to explain the behaviour of the sociopathic narcissist in Donald Trump’s Dislike for Ukraine Is Deeply Personal:
Yesterday, during a press conference about the United States’ bilateral talks with Russia to end the Russo-Ukrainian War — talks which, currently at least, have bypassed Ukraine entirely, a goal Vladimir Putin long sought — Donald Trump casually averred that Ukraine actually started the Ukrainian invasion:
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.”
It was not a confidence-inspiring moment for those who believe in basic historical fact, let alone for those who know how to check calendars: Trump’s language suggested rather clearly that he resented Ukraine for failing to surrender as Russia prepared to occupy Kyiv and annex the entire country back in February-March of 2022. In case anyone was prepared to defend this as a mere slip of the tongue, Trump went ahead today and offered the world more of his thoughts about Ukraine from his Truth Social account:
"Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is “MISSING.” He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle.” A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues….."
I’m glad there’s clearly no character limit to posting over there, at least — in either sense of the phrase — so we got to see the unfiltered Donald. To be perfectly honest, I’m more interested in all of the people on the right who will now pretend they agree with every word of this run-on disgrace because Trump Said It Out Loud — so now it’s time to “fall in line” with the message like a well-trained myrmidon — than I am in those who actually believe it all. (What can I say? I dislike the hypocrites more, and I know who they are.)
See how he must do a dance around the crazed cultists:
I also know what many of the responses to my outrage over this will be — I have been receiving them all day on social media, after all — and I will restate the gist of them for you here: “It’s just a negotiating tactic to end the war. It’s 4-D chess. I trust in Trump, I trust in the process.” Many more on the right seem happy to go further than that and adopt Trump’s claims wholesale.
I instead am going to draw a much straighter, cleaner line to explain Donald Trump’s ferocious hostility toward Ukraine and Zelensky. Donald Trump was once impeached over Ukraine and Zelensky. You do remember that, right? I ask because I am shocked at how many seem to have forgotten — at how many are analyzing this week’s events through anything but that filter — perhaps because it was only his first of two impeachments.
Using that notion of personal ferocious hostility, Blehar does his best to swing it around in the blame game:
It’s really that simple. His tone can be explained by personal history more than anything else. Back in 2019, Donald Trump’s presidency — already under siege after a brutal midterm election in the House — was derailed by what he considers to be a spurious impeachment attempt by the Democrats. Trump was arraigned for improperly “interfering with the 2020 election” by pressuring Zelensky to probe the details of Hunter and Joe Biden’s financial entanglements with their government — entanglements we now have every reason to believe were indeed significant and deeply corrupt, certainly on Hunter’s part.
Meanwhile, the first three years of Trump’s administration had already been partially derailed by the absurd and sinister “Russiagate” hoax, involving politicized national security greybeards, the mainstream media, and the Democratic Party in a joint plot to hamstring Trump’s mandate from Day One with widely believed claims of his being on the take from Russia, which supposedly engineered his victory via “disinformation.” (It was “Russiagate” more than anything else that fueled the original “Resistance,” the belief that he was an illegitimate president fit to be undermined rather than obeyed because he “didn’t really win.”) But it wasn’t Russia per se that did anything to him; it was Russia’s being used as a club against him that dogged his first term in office. You and I may hate Putin, but as far as Trump is concerned, they have no particular beef.
But after those distractions and deflections, and the attempt to pretend that Vlad the sociopath has nothing on his patsy, and it's all just personal, even Blehar has to attempt a reality adjustment:
So forgive me if I doubt that Trump is just negotiating like a “great dealmaker” or playing the geopolitical game of a chessmaster by keeping Americans and Europeans alike shockingly off-guard with his intemperate public rhetoric. I’ve always believed him to be a much simpler man than that and, in this, at least been proven correct every time: He says things like this because this is how he feels right now. I think his attitude toward Ukraine accords with his lifelong priors, yes: Trump regards most countries as being essentially parasitic upon the United States, taking advantage of our purported self-inflicted economic “weakness” in the modern era (hence his pronounced contempt for NATO and the EU); he also reflexively disdains “weak” Ukraine vis-a-vis the historically “strong” Russians, who dominated his imagination as a youth. But more importantly, Trump hates Zelensky and Ukraine because they have become a totem for all the forces that tormented Trump for years.
That is why I also ask you to forgive me if I suspect Trump is incapable of seeing straight when it comes to America’s long-term national interests in Ukraine, as compared to his private resentments there. (This is a man whose ideal vision of government, after all, seems to be one he inherited from his mentor Roy Cohn.) I have always doubted him on this score, which is why I have always doubted his ability to serve the national interest when it conflicted with his own. Nothing Donald Trump has done this week has persuaded me otherwise.
Even in the National Review, saucy doubts and fears, and with Hunter Biden only going so far to ease the pain...
The Atlantic, encore cette chanson:
Oh wait, the pond sees that The Atlantic has moved on...
Just look at all the introspection and agonising going on at the moment ...
Quick, before the worlds start turning above the Faraway Tree and a new land arrives...
Now Tom Nichols is headlining with Who Is Running the United States, Musk or Trump? (archive link)
In an interview with Sean Hannity, three men demonstrated that they have no idea how American democracy works.
Ah the notorious Fox interview ...
Hannity says shit:
...and yet while Nichols quotes George W. observing that was some weird shit, he discreetly avoids mentioning Hannity stumbling over "shit" in another interview...
... because it's impossible to keep up with all the shit ...
King Donald strikes again in the Beast:
King Donald I is never ending gold for the tabloids, taking over the Beast's obsession with royalty and Megan Markle...
How they love to be titillated by their new King:
Cue another troll from the relentless trolls (archive)...
The Scammer-in-Chief:
Every other moment comes news of a new scam by the king of scams...
Furiously Frumming Away in The Atlantic:
That's why the pond can only begin to mention David Frum in The Atlantic, ranting about A Cautionary Tale for Trump Appointees (archive link)...
... the evidence of past days suggests they are all deluding themselves. Trump wants to abandon Ukraine more than he has wanted to do anything as president, except possibly protect and pardon the January 6 criminals. His aides are playing the part of William P. Rogers, even as the real action is occurring all around them.
That's not news, it wasn't news years ago. How many times can this rapidly aging joke be re-told in the 'toons?
Carry on Frumming like a furious bandersnatch...
If that’s not how they want to be remembered, they have to act fast. They have to begin by recognizing that this president wants to destroy Ukraine—and is surrounded by enablers who want to help him.
Perhaps Trump can be corralled, but if the pro-American faction within this administration wants to make itself felt, it has to be prepared to play as tough and rough as the pro-Putin faction from the president on down.
William P. Rogers was eventually fired by Nixon for his unwillingness to say and do all that Nixon wanted to defend Nixon during the Wagergate scandal. That’s the fate hanging over all those who joined this administration hoping to make it better. Trump is determined to make it worse. He’s the president, and he’s backed in his anti-Ukraine views by the people he most cares about. The noisy resignation is the ultimate weapon of the political appointee, and people inside this administration who care about America’s good name had best be prepared to use it. Otherwise, they will be used as fools and fronts in an administration that seems to be placing Russian interests ahead of America’s own.
Principled resignations?
In Frum's idle dreams, they had to be delusional fools or wretched knaves to sign on in the first place ...the only principled resignations have come from those those who didn't join the cult, those just going about the government's business.
They were brave and were willing to step outside the tent into the cold...you'd have to be a compleat tosser and wanker and a delusional narcissist to think you could join hoping to make it better (put Little Marco in whatever category you like, but tosser will do for the pond).
At last a few 'toons:
And then there are the cartoons, covering some of the other stuff that needs covering...
It's simply impossible to keep up with all of them, from the immortal Rowe giving an anal twist to the SA steel affair (with Faux News almost in old Twentieth Century Fox mode)...
... to other minions not mentioned in all the wordage above ...
Yes, amazingly, after all that, RFK Jr. was left to be fodder for the 'toons...
The pond is standing by for a flood of Kash Patel 'toons, though the man is such a caricature of a joke he's going to be a tough 'toon nut to crack ... and with that dread thought looming, the pond has had more than enough for a late arvo post ...
Off to learn the drums, practise the ancient art of crocheting, or read Roman literature in readiness for our Henry on a Friday ...
