Lou Reed: "You Can't Depend On The Goodly Hearted, The Goodly Hearted Made Lamp-Shades And Soap"

Trump's Got To Be Stopped— At The Polls

Yesterday, Alan Feuer reported that aggressive, baseless filings by Trump’s lawyers in the stolen documents case claimed that law enforcement has been weaponized against him in a series of overreaching and politically driven witch hunts. However, in releasing those filings, MAGA judge Aileen Cannon also unsealed a 2023 opinion from DC District Court Judge Beryl Howell found that Trump knowingly stashed national security documents in his home and then attempted to conceal them when the Justice Department came to retrieve them. Four months after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump’s attorneys reportedly discovered four documents marked “classified” in his personal bedroom, despite previous assurances everything had been returned.

On Tuesday, Jacob Heilbrunn penned a guest column for the NY Times, The Real Danger If Trump Is Re-elected, warning about Trump’s authoritarian bent and attraction to “strong” dictators abroad. “Trump,” he wrote,”has extolled authoritarian leaders as possessing the right stuff, while he has dismissed democratic ones as weak and feckless. This impulse is not a new phenomenon for the United States; it dates back to World War I and World War II, when leading American conservatives praised foreign autocrats such as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco as their ideological comrades in arms. Until now, however, no modern president has lauded autocracy as a model for America… [Trump] is poised to adopt a radical program centered on constructive engagement with foreign strongmen and hostility toward democratic allies; it would include abandoning NATO. It would convert America from a dominant economic and military power into what Trump purports to abhor— a global loser... Would the damage be irreversible? Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany supposedly remarked that ‘God has a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.’ But Trump’s return might test even the Almighty’s patience. Trump’s economic and foreign policy nationalism would subvert the preponderance of power that America has enjoyed since 1945 and that he has promised to bolster. It has been threatened from without but never from within. As he vows to upend America’s relations with the rest of the globe, the danger is not that Trump would fail to live up to his principles. It’s that he would.”

That Trump— and the people he surrounds himself with— are full-blown fascists is only disputed by imbeciles and some GOP wishful thinkers, although they’re mostly imbeciles as well. Not imbeciles:

Yesterday, John Pavlovitz noted that playground bullies are up to be Christian Nationalists and MAGA Republicans. He reiterated that as these kids preyed on “those who were vulnerable or alone or different— not because these people posed any true threat to them, but because the violence provided a moment of escape from the voice in their heads that told them they were worthless and unloved and endangered. They could only find value if they had a space to own and impose their will on people within: a classroom, an alleyway, a neighborhood. They needed a domain to define themselves by. Many of the bullies have simply grown taller and older, but have stayed scared children— and instead of finding compassion for the world around them, they remain trapped in contempt for the vulnerable and the alone and the different. Only they are no longer satisfied with a classroom or an alleyway or a neighborhood to defend from the monsters in their heads— they need an entire country.”

They've traded in their clenched fists for AR-15s,their hallway words for social media diatribes,their street corner gang of thugs for partisan news networks,their side street turf to southern borders and inner cities,their petulant ringleader for a malignant former President.They are as emotionally stunted and grievously wounded as ever, only now they can damage people far more expeditiously from Senate seats and megachurch pulpits than they ever could in front of lockers or beneath bleachers.One of our political parties and their base is beholden to a staggeringly insecure man-child and he has been leading an angry procession of all the other similarly broken perpetual children, who need to hurt and exclude others the way normal people need oxygen— and this simply can't be tolerated.

…The rest of us need to call out these petrified terrorists everywhere they show themselves: to shine light into the dark places they thrive in; to answer their brazen white power hand signs with strident, multi-colored middle fingers that let them know they don't get to assault people any longer.

In our churches,in our local politics,at school board meetings,at our workplaces,in our schools,on social mediain our neighborhoods,in our family gatherings— we need to speak loudly in opposition.America cannot be given over to the bullies or defined by their vitriol or governed by their bigotry.We can't surrender ourselves to those who wield religion and legislation as weapons, against human beings whose sole offense to them is being Muslim or black or migrant or gay or transgender or female— and living in the neighborhood these people have decided they own.

Trump scams the people who trust him— It's how he got rich, and he's not going to stop was Matthew Yglesias’ post yesterday, remarking on how Trump takes advantage of the fact that “a huge factor in Trump-era politics is a sense among those on the right that they are besieged, socially and culturally. Diffuse forces in academia, in the media, in public health, in libraries, in museums, and almost everywhere else are conspiring to advance a liberal agenda, and you need someone who won’t just win an election and pass some laws, but someone who will root the conspiracy out at the source, crushing the left. In that context, the liberal fear of Trump as an aspirational dictator is part of what rightists like and admire about him. They’re not exactly saying he’ll be a good type of dictator. But they are saying they need a fighter, a tough guy, a guy who can battle a rigged system and win— and it’s good that liberals fear him.”

Because of this dynamic, I think it’s important to make the point that Trump is a scumbag in ways that don’t just read as affluent privileged liberals cowering in fear. I am afraid that Trump will slash Medicaid, yank FDA approval of mifepristone, reduce regulatory protections for people with pre-existing health conditions, raise the relative price of goods versus services in a way that hurts the middle class and the poor, and otherwise implement bad public policy. But this stuff won’t hurt me personally, and I also have to admit that a GOP nominee who scans as more competent and normal— Doug Burgum, say— would probably be more effective at implementing public policy ideas that I regard as normatively bad.

What makes Trump uniquely dangerous is his disregard for the rule of law. But while it’s certainly possible that Trump will leverage that disregard to advance conservative policy aims, what he has actually consistently done throughout his career is seek personal financial benefit, specifically at the expense of his fans and admirers.

… The story Trump likes to tell about himself is that he’s a self-made man who got nothing but a single generous loan from his dad. Of course, that’s false. But the counter-narrative that he’s just a rich kid who inherited a fortune is also sort of wrong. He did get a lot of money from his dad, but he’d basically lost all of it by the mid-1990s. What he owned was some not-particularly-profitable hotels encumbered by onerous debts. If you gave that to the typical person, they could probably have managed to sell it for something, but not necessarily all that much. The properties were, by that point, genuinely not worth much.

But Trump made legitimately large amounts of money while successfully deleveraging from those debts, overwhelmingly by stealing money from the investors in his company.

By the end the company was bankrupt, but he earned tens of millions bankrupting it. The same year of the bankruptcy, The Apprentice debuted on NBC and proved to be a huge success. Starring in a hit television show is a good way to get rich, whether or not you have business savvy. But starring in a hit television show, the premise of which is that you’re a master businessman, is also great for your external reputation. So even though all these shenanigans were covered at the time, more people watch network television (especially 20 years ago) than read financial reporting in the Wall Street Journal. So a lot of people were left with the impression that Trump got out of trouble through savvy business practice. This is true in the sense that he conned his investors out of a lot of money, but I think if you’d pitched that idea on the show, it wouldn’t have been warmly received. Americans like and respect people who build successful businesses, and that kind of blatant theft is not normally what we have in mind.

…The long-tail risk of his conduct is that something genuinely disastrous happens for the whole country. But the most likely scenario is that he continues to be what he’s been for 30 years: a grifter who rips off the people who trust him, while being relatively ineffective at pursuing his ostensible goals.