Josh Marshall - A Few Thoughts on Messages and Morale

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A Few Thoughts on Messages and Morale

By Josh Marshall

February 1, 2025 11:18 a.m.

Over the last few days, as I’ve struggled with everyone else to stay on top of all this, I’ve tried to balance two things. One of those is trying to keep people focused on what an opposition can actually do and what it can’t. The other is that you can’t simply be, in effect, yelling at people who are bewildered and scared. I saw a DNC member who was at that cattle call Thursday saying how weird it was hearing elected officials talking like these were normal times when actually the house is burning down around everyone. So how to reconcile primal screams and concrete plans and in the midst of that trying to make some progress on thinking outside the box, how to counteract and defeat performative displays of powerlessness.

The overarching thing that is missing from what Democratic leaders in Washington are saying right now is a clear statement that this is bad, that it’s likely to get worse for a while. But we don’t accept this; we have power too. We’re going to fight this in the courts; we’re going to gum up the works in Congress; and more than anything we’re going to fight this in the court of public opinion. And we’re going to win. And to do that we need all of you to be on our side. And as we claw back power we’re going to repair the damage and hold the people who broke everything accountable and build something better.

I guess what I’m saying here is that people need a road map that is frank about how bad this is and says at least the outline of a plan to battle back. The whole point of this kind of shock and awe, slash and burn is to disorient and demoralize people. And people need a lifeline to get through that.

One of the big things I’ve seen over recent days is people being really upset that this or that Democrat voted for this or that relatively (everything is relative) innocuous nominee. For me I just can’t get that worked up about what amount to purely symbolic yes or no votes for a Sean Duffy or a Kristi Noem. But I also see that to a lot of people those votes send a signal of business as usual. And that’s totally in conflict with any sense of a crisis that you’re focused on battling back against and winning.

Adam Schiff was on Bluesky or Twitter last night announcing the new Saturday Night Massacre of prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the January 6th cases, denouncing it as illegal. And he was greeted not with a surge of outrage at the Trump administration but outrage against him. ‘And what are you going to do about it? I bet you’re going to fire off a sternly worded press release.’ This is the real the jam in which Democrats find themselves. They can’t talk about what’s happening without their own supporters lashing out at them since lashing out at the Trump administration doesn’t do anything or seems not to.

But you really do need to lay out a blueprint. Not to get all sentimental and mawkish and yes a bit corny but I think back to Winston Churchill taking over the Prime Ministership with the fall of France in June 1940. (I admitted in advance it was corny; but seriously, bear with me.) He really didn’t have anything he could do other than try not to lose. The only plan was to hold on, not lose or to try to lose as little as possible and try to get the Americans into the fight. And in reality, though we can look at it differently in retrospect, there was every reason to think Great Britain would lose, or at least be forced into a humiliating, subservient peace. The US Ambassador (who remember, was John Kennedy’s dad, freakshow RFK Jr’s grandfather) was saying these guys are totally going to lose. And it was hard to argue with that as a matter of probabilities or logical arguments. But Churchill had a clear message: 1) We’re never going to give up. Literally never. 2) We’re going to battle back with these tools. And 3) Finally, we’re going to win.

In other words a path back, even over the obstacles of uncertainty, odds and maybe even logic. We’re going to get from here to there. And we’re really not hearing that yet from Democratic leaders in Washington yet. And the truth is the odds are wildly better for them than they were for the British in the Fall of 1940. And making that case is required above and beyond making whatever the right moves on on the ground. That’s sowing demoralization and sending a lot of people the message that Democratic leadership in Washington doesn’t recognize the gravity of the situation.

Hendrickson - The January 6er Who Left Trumpism

Hendrickson - The January 6er Who Left Trumpism

The Atlantic - Politics / by John Hendrickson / Jan 25, 2025 at 10:42 PM

“I was okay with being a convict,” Jason Riddle told me this week, not long after learning that he was among the roughly 1,500 recipients of sweeping presidential pardons. Some Americans, including President Donald Trump, believe that Riddle and others who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were unjustly persecuted and thus deserving of clemency—if not celebration. Riddle, a 36-year-old New Hampshire resident, rejects this framing. “I’m not a patriot or a hero just because the guy who started the riot says it’s okay,” he told me.

On Thursday, after consulting with his public defender, Riddle sent a pithy email to the Department of Justice:

To whom it may concern,

I’d like to reject my pardon please.

Sincerely,

Jason Riddle

Sent from my iPhone

Declining the pardon falls within Riddle’s legal rights. Many other January 6ers are holding out their hands for the president’s gift. “I can’t look myself in the mirror and do that,” Riddle said. Rather than whitewash his unsavory past, he feels called to own his behavior, even his most shameful moments—a tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous, which he says has saved him.

Some insurrectionists stormed the Capitol as true ideological warriors. Enrique Tarrio, a former leader of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, for example, were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States (and both men are now free). But many others who participated in the violence and destruction that day were similar to Riddle—people with ordinary lives and ordinary problems who found community and catharsis in the MAGA movement.

None of the above is an excuse for taking part in one of the ugliest moments in American history. But actively planning to carry out violence is arguably different from getting swept up in a mob. Today, Riddle doesn’t shirk his complicity. But the path that led him to the Capitol sheds light on how someone without much direction suddenly found it in a day of rage and mayhem. His story also raises an intriguing possibility: A person who stumbled into the darker corners of Trumpism can also stumble out.

For Riddle, the road to January 6 began after he graduated from high school, years before Trump’s first campaign. He served in the Navy and, according to his sentencing memo, “was honorably released from active duty to the naval reserves in light of reocurring [sic] struggles with alcohol use.” In college, at Southern Connecticut State University, as an older student, he decided to major in political science. On campus, he recalls feeling surrounded by younger Bernie Sanders supporters, while he took a liking to Trump. He described himself and another early Trump-supporting buddy as “obnoxious,” noting that they’d frequently drink in class. During Trump’s first presidential campaign, Riddle drove to rallies all over the country. At first he told himself that, as a poli-sci major, he was making anthropological field trips. In truth, he was becoming swept up in MAGA world.

He liked the excitement and controversy that surrounded Trump. “There was this aggression. I think I really enjoyed it,” he said. He’d pregame before the rallies, then join the crowds listening to the future president rant. “You go, you know, bond with these strangers,” he said. At that time in his life, Riddle remembers having barely any other interests or hobbies. He didn’t watch sports or exercise. He’d sit at home, drinking and trolling. “I spent all my time in those comments [sections] on social media, arguing with strangers,” Riddle said. “It was all about proving someone wrong. That would make me feel good about myself.”

After college, he struggled to hold down a job. Eventually, he found work as a mail carrier for the Postal Service. On his route, he’d ruminate. He’d carry on long conversations with a drinking buddy. “I would just be on the phone with my Bluetooth in, talking to another maniac who thinks like me, while just slowly going crazy,” Riddle said.

Radicalization can be a gradual process. He described himself as more of a libertarian than a MAGA Republican. In Trumpism, though, Riddle found an always-there outlet for his pent-up dissatisfaction with how his life was unfolding. But Trump’s time in office was running out. As he plotted to cling to power by desperate means, the president and his allies were spreading conspiracy theories about alleged voter fraud, including lies about mail-in ballots. “So I’m, like, literally working at the mail, which is what I believed to be part of the problem with the election,” Riddle said. In the weeks before the insurrection, he told me, he was drinking more heavily than ever. Sometimes, he’d stash additional booze in the mailbag he carried for the day’s rounds.

One day, drunk on the job, he abruptly quit, leaving piles of mail in his truck. Soon, he and two friends were driving from New Hampshire to Washington, D.C. One was a Trump supporter; the other, Riddle now thinks, was just along for the ride. Riddle’s own commitment to the “Stop the Steal” narrative involved some doublethink. “I know I’m wrong,” Riddle recalls telling himself. “Fuck it; I’m going down anyways.”

He recalls very clearly when he stepped over a barrier and marched into the Capitol. His friends stopped following him. “I remember actually seeing politicians from where I was standing,” he told me. “I could tell they were scared. I do remember enjoying that.”

Images of some of the other Capitol invaders soon spread on social media: the Viking-helmeted QAnon Shaman, the man with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, the guy carrying the speaker’s lectern. Riddle, too, achieved a kind of immortality: He was the insurrectionist hoisting a bottle of wine. In the immediate aftermath of the event, Riddle felt no remorse, or shame, or need to hide. He bragged about his exploits on a local newscast, and briefly enjoyed his newfound virality. He soon received a visit from the FBI.

In addition to pilfering booze from the Senate parliamentarian’s office, Riddle had stolen a leather-bound book labeled Senate Procedure, and quickly hawked it to a fellow rioter for $40. On April 4, 2022, at federal court in Washington, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison. “Three months for trying to stop the steal, one sip of wine at a time?” Riddle bragged to a New Hampshire newspaper. “Totally worth it.”

Even in prison, he still had his fame—or infamy. He remembers a correctional officer muttering “Let’s go, Brandon” to him on his first day, he told me, and that his fellow inmates nicknamed him “Trump.” But unlike some January 6ers, Riddle wasn’t further radicalized in prison, where he spent the summer of 2022. But neither did his conviction immediately lead him to repudiate the cause that had taken him to the Capitol. Riddle talked about running for Congress, leveraging what remained of his fleeting celebrity. He once filed paperwork, but never got any campaign off the ground.

Riddle thought he’d be able to manage his drinking after his release. But he struggled, and soon began attending daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He has relapsed a few times, but thanks largely to what he calls the “forced intervention” of his encounter with the criminal-justice system, he’s been living his “new life” for a little more than two years. Although sobriety remains a daily project, he feels he has finally gained insight into the reckless and self-destructive behavior that led him to the January 6 insurrection.

These days, he’s working at a restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire. He told me he feels comfortable in chaotic environments, and he’s thinking about looking for a job at a hospital or in mental-health services. Sobriety has changed his political perspective, too. Whereas he once viewed Trump as a bold truth teller, raw and unvarnished, he now sees the president as self-serving. When Trump called for public protests around the time of his indictments, Riddle felt especially played. “And I remember thinking, like, why would he do that? People died at the Capitol riot,” Riddle said. “That was the ‘duh’ moment I had with myself: Well, obviously because he doesn’t care about anybody other than himself, and you’re an idiot for thinking otherwise.”

Last fall, he donated to the Kamala Harris campaign, and voted for her in the election. An irony for him, after Trump’s reelection, is that he could be reliving his 2021 viral popularity—if he were still willing to exchange his version of reality for Trump’s. “One common thing I always hear is, like, ‘Good for you for going down there and expressing your views,’” he told me. “People who say that obviously don’t understand what they’re saying.”

The frustration in his voice was audible. “If I accept this pardon, if I agree to this pardon,” Riddle told me, “that means I disagree with that forced intervention.” Truth has finally collided with the president’s lies. Riddle may be enjoying one last hit of attention over his refusal of a pardon, but after the experience this week of seeing the insurrection’s ringleaders walk free, unrepentant, he is choosing a different path.

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Serwer - The Attack on Birthright Citizenship Is a Big Test for the Constitution

Adam Serwer by Adam Serwer / Jan 23, 2025 at 2:28 AM

The purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to settle once and for all the question of racial citizenship, forever preventing the subjugation of one class of people by another. Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship is an attempt to reverse one outcome of the Civil War, by creating a permanent underclass of stateless people who have no rights they can invoke in their defense.

In 1856, in the infamous Dred Scott decision that declared that Black people could not be American citizens, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that as “a subordinate and inferior class of beings,” Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Yes, the Declaration of Independence had stated that “all men are created equal,” but “the enslaved African race were not intended to be included.”

Frederick Douglass, who argued that the Constitution did not sanction slavery, responded to the Taney decision by saying that one could find a defense of slavery in the Constitution only “by discrediting and casting away as worthless the most beneficent rules of legal interpretation; by disregarding the plain and common sense reading of the instrument itself; by showing that the Constitution does not mean what it says, and says what it does not mean, by assuming that the written Constitution is to be interpreted in the light of a secret and unwritten understanding of its framers, which understanding is declared to be in favor of slavery.” Sounds familiar.

Trump’s executive order similarly rewrites the Constitution by fiat, something the president simply does not have the authority to do. The order, which purports to exclude the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants from citizenship, states that such children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. and therefore not included in the amendment’s language extending citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” This makes no sense on its own terms—as the legal scholar Amanda Frost wrote earlier this month, “Undocumented immigrants must follow all federal and state laws. When they violate criminal laws, they are jailed. If they park illegally, they are ticketed.” The ultraconservative Federal Judge James C. Ho observed in 2006 that “Text, history, judicial precedent, and Executive Branch interpretation confirm that the Citizenship Clause reaches most U.S.-born children of aliens, including illegal aliens.”

As such, Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship is an early test of the federal judiciary, and of the extent to which Republican-appointed judges and justices are willing to amend the Constitution from the bench just to give Trump what he wants. They have done so at least twice before, the first time by writing the Fourteenth Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists running for office out of the Constitution, and the second time by seeking to protect Trump from prosecution by inventing an imperial presidential immunity out of whole cloth. But accepting Trump’s attempt to abolish birthright citizenship would have more direct consequences for millions of people, by nullifying the principle that almost anyone born here is American.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, white southerners tried to restore, at gunpoint, the slave society that had existed prior to the war, notwithstanding the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery. Republicans in Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to secure equal citizenship and the Fifteenth Amendment to protect the right to vote regardless of race, amendments that guaranteed political and civil equality. The Civil War amendments, the work of the Republican Party, are the cornerstone of multiracial democracy in the United States. Despite this historic accomplishment, for the past 80 years or so, the party of Lincoln has aimed its efforts at repealing or nullifying them.

“Adopted as part of the effort to purge the United States of the legacy of slavery, birthright citizenship, with which the Fourteenth Amendment begins, remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society, a powerful force for assimilation of the children of immigrants, and a repudiation of a long history of racism,” the historian Eric Foner writes in The Second Founding, a history of the Civil War amendments, though he is cautious to note that these principles were not always respected by the government—Jim Crow and Japanese internment being obvious examples. Birthright citizenship was “a dramatic repudiation of the powerful tradition of equating citizenship with whiteness, a doctrine built into the naturalization process from the outset and constitutionalized by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott.”

This detachment of American citizenship from whiteness was one of the parts of the Fourteenth Amendment that Democrats, at the time the party of white supremacy, hated the most. “Democratic members of Congress repeatedly identified American nationality with ‘the Caucasian race,’ insisted that the government ‘was made for white men,’ and objected to extending the ‘advantages’ of American citizenship to ‘the Negroes, the coolies, and the Indians,’” Foner writes.

Trump’s immigration braintrust sees things similarly. In emails with conservative reporters, Trump’s point man on immigration, Stephen Miller, praised articles attacking the 1965 repeal of racist restrictions on immigration that had been passed in 1921 and were intended to keep out nonwhite people, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Jews. These laws again redefined American citizenship in racist terms, and helped inspire the Nazis. The end of those restrictions meant that more nonwhite immigrants were able to gain citizenship in the United States, a phenomenon conservatives have dubbed a “Great Replacement,” borrowing a concept from white-supremacist sources. That the Trump coalition now includes people who would have been shut out by Miller’s preferred immigration policies does not change the fact that Trump’s immigration advisers view the decline of the white share of the population as an apocalyptic occurrence that must be reversed. It is no accident that this project begins with the nullification of constitutional language guaranteeing citizenship regardless of race or country of origin.

Republicans have made significant inroads among nonwhite voters in the past few years. Their reasons for supporting Trump change neither the intent of his entourage nor the effects of his policies. A successful repeal of birthright citizenship would mean the so-called pro-life party creates a class of stateless infants, a shadow caste mostly unprotected by law. It would require Americans to prove their citizenship time and time again, and leave them vulnerable to administrative errors that could endanger proof of their status. These burdens would likely fall disproportionately on those nonwhite people Trumpists see as their “replacers,” no matter how enthusiastic about Trump they might be.

Since the rise of Trump, the once-fringe idea that the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer citizenship on the children of undocumented immigrants has gained traction among ambitious conservatives whose malleable principles allow them to shape themselves to Trump’s whims. By November of 2024 the aforementioned Ho, who had previously written a detailed law-review article rejecting such theories, had become a bombastic, partisan Trumpist judge; he carefully retraced his steps and insisted that the birthright-citizenship clause doesn’t apply in the case of immigrant “invasion,” substituting Fox News talking points for legal reasoning.

This is the level of respect for the Constitution one can expect from conservative jurists in the Trump era. Whatever Trump says is correct. What the original framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood was that the necessities of multiracial democracy demand more than bowing and scraping before this sort of lawlessness. For now, neither party’s political leadership seems up to the task.

Chait - Trump’s Second Term Might Have Already Peaked

The Atlantic - Politics by Jonathan Chait / Jan 23, 2025 at 4:18 AM

Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a credible threat to return to the White House, the guardrails that seemed to restrain him in his first term—political, legal, psychic—have collapsed with astonishing speed. His nominees are sailing through their confirmation hearings, including some who are underqualified and ideologically extreme. Titans of business and media are throwing themselves at his feet as supplicants. He has obliterated long-standing norms, unashamedly soliciting payoffs from corporations with business before the government. (The Wall Street Journal reports that Paramount, whose parent company needs Trump’s approval for a merger, is mulling a settlement of one of his groundless lawsuits.) Steps that even his allies once dismissed as unthinkable, such as freeing the most violent, cop-beating January 6 insurrectionists, have again reset the bar of normalcy.

These displays of dominance have convinced many of Trump’s critics and supporters alike that his second term will operate in a categorically different fashion from the first. Where once he was constrained by the “deep state”—or, depending on your political priors, by the efforts of conscientious public servants—Trump will now have a fully subdued government at his disposal, along with a newly compliant business and media elite. He will therefore be able to carry out the sorts of wild policy objectives that failed to materialize during his first term.

The earliest indications, however, suggest that this might prove only half true. Trump has clearly claimed some territory in the culture wars: He is now dancing with Village People in the flesh, not merely to a recording of the group’s most famous track. And when it comes to getting away with self-dealing and abuses of power, he has mastered the system. But a politician and a party that are built for propaganda and quashing dissent generally lack the tools for effective governance. As far as policy accomplishments are concerned, the second Trump term could very well turn out to be as underwhelming as the first.

Trump has promised a grand revolution. At a pre-inaugural rally, he announced, “The American people have given us their trust, and in return, we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.” He branded his inauguration “Liberation Day,” labeled his incoming agenda a “revolution of common sense,” and boasted, “Nothing will stand in our way.” After being sworn in on Monday, he signed a slew of executive orders in a move that has been termed “shock and awe.”

Those orders fall into a few different categories. Some are genuinely dangerous—above all, the mass pardon of about 1,500 January 6 defendants, which unambiguously signals that lawbreaking in the service of subverting elections in Trump’s favor will be tolerated. Others, including withdrawing from the World Health Organization and freezing offshore wind energy, will be consequential but perhaps not enduring—that which can be done by executive order can be undone by it.

What’s really striking is how many fall into the category of symbolic culture-war measures or vague declarations of intent. Trump declared a series of “emergencies” concerning his favorite issues, just as Joe Biden had. His order declaring an end to birthright citizenship seems likely to be struck down on constitutional grounds, although the Supreme Court can always interpret the Fourteenth Amendment’s apparently plain text as it desires. He is re-renaming a mountain in Alaska—which, in four years’ time, could be renamed yet again, perhaps after one of the police officers who fought off Trump’s insurrection attempt. He has ordered the federal government to officially recognize only two genders, male and female. “You are no longer going to have robust and long drop-down menus when asking about sex,” an incoming White House official said. Ooooh, the federal intake forms will be shorter!

Meanwhile, Trump has already scaled back many of his most grandiose day-one promises from the campaign. Broker an end to the Ukraine war before taking office? He has “made no known serious effort to resolve the war since his election,” The New York Times reports. Ask again in a few months. Bring down grocery prices? Never mind.

Trump’s supporters probably realized that some of his campaign pledges were hyperbolic. Even by realistic standards, however, Trump seems unprepared to deliver on some of his biggest stated goals. Take his signature domestic policy. Trump loudly promised throughout the presidential campaign to impose massive global tariffs once he took office. And yet, even that proposal remains theoretical. Trump’s executive order on trade instructs, “The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the United States Trade Representative, shall investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, as well as the economic and national security implications and risks resulting from such deficits, and recommend appropriate measures,” and then proceeds to issue more solemn calls for study of the matter.

Presidents don’t always come into office with fully formed plans, but Trump doesn’t even have concepts of a plan, or any way to resolve fundamental tension between his belief that foreign countries should pay tariffs and the reality that tariffs raise prices for Americans. Another White House document announces, “All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.” What measures? We can be fairly sure that there is no secret plan waiting to be unveiled.

None of this is to say that Trump will accomplish nothing. At a minimum, he will restrict immigration and sign a regressive tax cut. But even his policy successes will likely sow the seeds of a thermostatic backlash in public opinion. Americans favor mass deportation in the abstract, but their support dwindles when they contemplate specifics. An Axios poll found that strong majorities oppose separating families, employing active-duty military to locate undocumented immigrants, and using military funds to carry out immigration policy. Even some high-level Trump allies have warned that mass deportations will cause immediate economic disruption.

Trump’s fiscal agenda is where the desires of his wealthy benefactors, the preferences of his voters, and economic conditions will clash most violently. The previous two Republican presidents to take office—George W. Bush in 2001, and Trump in 2017—inherited low inflation and low or falling interest rates. Both were able to cut taxes and raise spending without facing any near-term economic costs. In his second term, Trump faces an economy that, while growing smartly, is still plagued with high interest rates relative to the pre-COVID norm. If Trump revises the old playbook of cutting taxes now and worrying about the cost later, he may discover that “later” happens right away.

One answer to the dilemma would be to pay for tax cuts with deep cuts to social spending on the poor, a staple of past Republican budgets. Yet Trump’s strength with low-income voters turns that maneuver into another potential source of backlash. Last month, The Washington Post’s Tim Craig interviewed low-income Trump voters in a poor town in Pennsylvania who earnestly believe that he will not touch their benefits.

Meanwhile, some of Trump’s most prominent backers refuse to acknowledge that any tough choices await. In a recent interview, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat presented Marc Andreessen, one of the Silicon Valley billionaires hoping to influence Trump’s domestic agenda, with concerns that Elon Musk’s plans to cut the budget would alienate voters. In response, Andreessen insisted that the very suggestion reflected “absolute contempt for the taxpayer,” repeating versions of the line rather than engaging with the problem. Musk himself recently reduced his goal of cutting $2 trillion from the budget to a mere $1 trillion. When the brains of the operation are picking arbitrary round numbers and then revising them arbitrarily, one begins to question their grasp on the challenge they face.

Whether Trump pays any political price for failing to deliver on unrealistic promises—or for succeeding at delivering on unpopular ones—is an open question. Political difficulties won’t generate themselves. They will require an energetic and shrewd opposition. And a major purpose of Trump’s maneuvers to intimidate corporate and media elites is to head off a backlash by gaining control over the information environment.

One of Trump’s greatest strengths as a politician is to constantly redefine his policy goals so that whatever he does constitutes “winning.” The success of this tactic reflects the degraded intellectual state of the Republican Party’s internal culture. The conservative movement rejected institutions such as academia and the mainstream media decades ago, building up its own network of loyal counterinstitutions that would construct an alternate reality. This has helped Republicans hold together in the face of corruption and misconduct that, in a bygone era, would have shattered a governing coalition. (Today, Watergate would just be another witch hunt.) But the impulse to disregard expertise and criticism has also disabled Republicans’ ability to engage in objective analysis. The past two Republican administrations accordingly both ended in catastrophe, because the president had built an administration of courtiers who flattered his preexisting beliefs, whether about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq or COVID and the economy.

None of those pathologies has disappeared. To the contrary, the MAGA-era GOP has grown more cultlike than ever. The rare, feeble attempt to steer Trump away from bad decisions is usually buried in obsequious flattery. The Trump presidency will be, by definition, a golden age, because Trump will be president during all of it. But it is a measure of his allies’ decrepitude that, whatever positions he ultimately lands on, they are prepared to salute.

Trump has struck fear into his party and America’s corporate bosses. His inauguration was a display of mastery, a sign that none will dare defy his wishes. But a leader surrounded by sycophants cannot receive the advice he needs to avoid catastrophic error, and to signal that his allies can enrich themselves from his administration is to invite scandal. In his inaugural spectacle of dominance and intimidation, Trump was planting the seeds of his own failure.

Ryan Broderick - Holding up a mirror to America

Ryan Broderick - Holding up a mirror to America

There Was Nothing Ever Unique About TikTok And I Can Prove It

—By Adam Bumas

As of writing this, the Supreme Court has ruled that TikTok is banned in the US. Former President Joe Biden said he wouldn’t enforce it as he left office over the weekend. President Donald Trump has said he supports a 90-day extension to explore a 50% US ownership of the app. And ByteDance is not against some kind of deal to keep it running. And service providers like Oracle are the ones left trying to figure out the legal liability of allowing TikTok access to continue in the US amid all of this. It’s become, predictably, a big giant political rats nest. Made even stupider and uglier by the fact that, if our lawmakers were to really look at TikTok data from the last six years, as I have, they’d know that none of this will actually “kill” TikTok’s influence because it doesn’t actually have any. Let me explain.

I was studying and analyzing TikTok long before I started working for Garbage Day, but for the past few years, as part of my work on this newsletter, I’ve been tracking what’s trending on TikTok month-to-month. And my biggest insight from years of lurking on the country’s various For You Pages is that the “TikTok trend,” as we understand it, does not actually exist.

Almost everything popular meme on the app either starts elsewhere or gets popular after it moves off the platform. And this has been true since TikTok’s first big viral moment in late 2019, thanks to Charli D’Amelio, who had the app’s most-followed account until 2022. A competitive dancer, D’Amelio’s success came from performing the elaborately choreographed dances like “The Renegade” that were TikTok’s bread and butter in its early days. After D’Amelio’s video started going viral, though, she was blasted for not actually choreographing any of the dances herself, but got all the credit, attention, and ad revenue (and a cringe Jimmy Fallon segment).

In 2020, two weeks after D’Amelio parlayed her TikTok fame to a Super Bowl ad, journalist Taylor Lorenz profiled the Renegade dance’s original choreographer. Jalaiah Harmon had originally posted the dance on an app called Funimate, before reposting it to Instagram, where it then spread to TikTok. It’s been forgotten at this point, but much of TikTok’s early popularity depended on these other short-form video apps — Dubsmash, Likee, and even Vine — and completely monopolized any attention the original sources might have gotten. But TikTok doesn’t just feed off its competitors. The overwhelming majority of TikTok trends that get big enough for someone like me to actually monitor wouldn’t exist without places like YouTube and Reddit feeding them, as well.

The way TikTok gobbles up the rest of the web means finding the sources for TikTok trends is like seeing the rings on the tree for internet culture. The craze for Stanley water bottles started on a mommy blog. Aesthetics like cottagecore are holdovers from Tumblr. More recently, the efforts by other tech companies to copy TikTok have had their own successes. Skibidi Toilet started as a YouTube Short, and Haliey Welch said “hawk tuah” in an Instagram Reel.

Of course, most normal people don’t care about where the fun online thing they saw comes from. When writer Emma Stefansky for Thrillist tried to untangle the thread of a dance D’Amelio performed, Stefansky wrote, “Following an internet trend's virality is almost as complex and random as the forces that drive something to go viral in the first place.”

But the enormous financial and social — and political — dividends we’ve bestowed on TikTok popularity means it really does matter to the folks in charge. TikTok fame can wreck communities under the strain, give businesses too many customers to handle, and make tourist hotspots too hot to visit. None of these were unpopular before the algorithm blew them up, since, from what I’ve seen, they couldn’t have sustained interest otherwise. But the reason so many things now get lumped into “TikTok trends” is mostly a matter of headcount. Wherever these trends originate, the app exposes them to an enormous and fiercely engaged new audience that uses their algorithm to navigate the overcrowded cultural landscape. Ironically, they become the ones doing the overcrowding.

I wouldn’t say it’s true that nothing big starts on TikTok, but it’s got to leave it fast. The first time I covered the site it was to report on Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical in 2020. The actual show starring Tony winners, which even got Disney’s blessing to raise money for Broadway actors put out of work by the pandemic, started with a TikTok. Crucially, though, there were only about five days between a remix of the original starting the trend in earnest, and an enterprising theater kid doing the actual organizational work to mount the show. But there are plenty of other “trends” like this that languish on random For You Pages and disappear back into the digital swamp, without their obligatory TODAY Show segment.

And I honestly get a little sad when I look into the history of something that’s starting to spread on people’s FYPs and see it treated as “a new trend” over and over as the algorithm forgets and rediscovers it. Have you heard about this not-at-all-new thing called mewing, which I had to look into a few weeks ago? If you didn’t hear about the latest trend from last November, maybe you might recognize it from last March, or the September before that, or the January before that, or the July before that, or the October before that. I mean, come on!

This TikTok self-cannibalization is why it’s so rare to see a trend that’s entirely homegrown on the app. Though, it’s not just the algorithm, but the culture its total dominion creates, where you genuinely can’t be sure if anyone will see your video if the algorithm doesn’t like it. It leads to a whole new lexicon of euphemisms, hashtags that look like keysmashing, and a culture of discouragement — even fear — of posting anything not on-trend. And when there is something really new and really native to TikTok — whether that’s “Who TF Did I Marry” or the Keith Lee effect — it’s usually from young people of color, who, like with the D’Amelio dance, are forgotten about the minute a white teenager takes it and runs with it.

This all isn’t to say that there was nothing novel about TikTok. It obviously did give Americans genuinely new ways to communicate and create culture, but the culture we created with it was always there. Thanks to TikTok, America finally saw itself and it scared us. It turns out Americans don’t talk the way we think they should, don’t dress the way we expected, dance the way we’d like, or have the political beliefs our lawmakers have been told we do. A Chinese tech company gave us a mirror and our politicians hated it so much they’d rather destroy it — or try and control it — than face the reflection staring back at us.

Foer - How Biden Destroyed His Legacy

Foer - How Biden Destroyed His Legacy

The Atlantic - Politics by Franklin Foer / Jan 17, 2025 at 9:39 PM

During his four years in office, Joe Biden notched significant legislative victories with the narrowest of majorities in the Senate. He presided over a virtuoso rollout of the COVID vaccines, the rapidity of which saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and he invested billions in the preservation of an independent Ukraine, which helped stymie the fulfillment of Russia’s revanchist dreams. America’s primary adversary, China, is measurably weaker than when he assumed the job. The U.S. economy is measurably stronger. The sum total of achievement is enough that it might someday tempt historians into declaring Biden an underrated president.

But such revisionism will never be convincing. As clearly as any recent president, Biden proposed the standard for judging his performance. From the time he began running for office, he presented himself as democracy’s defender at the republic’s moment of greatest peril. Battling autocracy was the stated rationale for his foreign policy—and the same spirit infused his domestic agenda. He said that he’d designed his legislative program as a demonstration project, to show that “our democracy can still do big things.”

When Biden issued his public warnings about the system’s fragility, he tended to deliberately avoid mentioning Donald Trump by name, but the implication was clear enough. The inability to stave off a second Trump term, and the stress on democracy that it would inevitably bring, would be the gravest catastrophe of them all. By stubbornly setting off on his reelection campaign, by strapping his party to his shuffling frame, he doomed the nation to realizing the nightmare scenario that he’d promised to prevent. He created the ideal conditions for Trump’s return, and for his own spectacular failure.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.’s obituary will be stalked by the counterfactual: What if he hadn’t made the selfish decision to run for reelection? What if he had passed the torch a year or even six months earlier? That makes for a grim parlor game.

The way that events unfolded—his catastrophic debate performance, the stark clarity with which the nation came to understand his geriatric state–-beggars belief. Why didn’t Democrats stage an intervention earlier? Why didn’t his aides stop him from running? The absurd premise of the Biden reelection campaign, that it made sense for the nation to trust itself to a president who would finish his term at the age of 86, invites conspiratorial explanations.

And in the age of conspiracies, these theories will gain wide purchase. They posit a broad cover-up hatched by aides bent on preserving their own power. In this imagined scenario, as Biden aimlessly wandered around the White House in a state of near-dementia, unable to perform the essential functions of the presidency, his inner circle suppressed the evidence of his decay, and a cabal of Democratic pols and corrupt journalists abetted them.

But turning this into a story about nefarious elites both oversells and underplays the scandal. It oversells it by baselessly suggesting that Biden’s age prevented him from carrying out his constitutional duties. And it underplays the scandal because his advisers and protectors are guilty of one of the greatest lapses of common sense in political history. A cabal intent on preserving its own power would never have blundered in such tragically self-defeating fashion.

When Biden came into office, I chronicled his first two years for a book about his White House. You didn’t have to be Bob Woodward to see that the president was an old man. I heard stories about him failing to conjure names; he confused the current Virginia Senator Mark Warner with the late Virginia Senator John Warner. In conversations, his anecdotes would meander excruciatingly into cul-de-sacs. His schedule didn’t begin until late in the morning, which suggested a deficit of stamina.

I also interviewed hundreds of aides and politicians who spent extended time with Biden. As I learned about his management style, I didn’t encounter evidence of a president who was catatonic. I heard stories about his temper, how he snapped at aides who failed to bring him the information he wanted, how he raged against pundits who disparaged him. As his advisers told it, he would micromanage them, sometimes unproductively, and overprepare for meetings—a product of his deep insecurities.

Aides and lawmakers almost always noted his age. Oftentimes, they did so with admiration. One of the virtues of an old president is experience, and the wisdom that comes with it. During the most impressive stretch of his administration, he leveraged his long history of working in the Senate and traveling to foreign capitals. He didn’t need on-the-job training. His closest political confidantes, most of whom have worked with him for decades, regarded Biden as a father figure, which meant that they suffered from a very human problem: the difficulty of judging the decline of an aging parent.

Decline is a matter of perception, and those perceptions are sometimes tainted by wishful thinking, by the hope that a parent still has a few hurrahs left in them. (Now that Biden is a political loser, insiders will rush to publicly say that they saw evidence of his decline before the rest of us did.)

Perceptions are also tainted by a lifetime of memories. Every human has their foibles, which tend to grow exaggerated with age but remain consistent with familiar patterns. So when Biden would get lost in stories, it was possible to say: That’s just Uncle Joe, always reminiscing about the good old days, always a bit verbose. When he fumbled for words, well, that was his childhood stutter rearing its head.

What’s undoubtedly true is that, over the past four years, Biden’s aging accelerated, because that’s what happens in the White House. When members of an administration leave the West Wing, it’s as if they have been subjected to a biological experiment that wrinkles their skin and whitens their hair, compressing 20 years of biological deterioration into four. Biden would have been a supernatural being if his body had resisted these changes. He absorbed the stresses of managing multiple wars and the toll of a presidential campaign (albeit a sclerotic one).

All that said, I have never seen evidence that he made bad decisions because of his age. I’ve never seen evidence that his aides were actually dictating policy without his consent. At worst, his flagging energy undermined his credibility as a leader and projected weakness to his adversaries, at home and abroad, although those cautious tendencies arguably predated his decline.

There’s no need to go searching for hidden scandals, however, because the visible one is sufficiently terrible. Democrats ignored a cascade of warning signs. The evidence that Biden wasn’t fit for a second term was abundantly clear in his public appearances—and in the public appearances that he studiously avoided. Advisers knew that Biden’s instinct was always to invest faith in his own capacities, but they never made a concerted effort to talk him back from his decision to run, until it was far too late. Donald Trump is their legacy too.

Donald Trump will upend 80 years of American foreign policy

Jan 16th 2025

Donald Trump will upend 80 years of American foreign policy — The Economist

Read time: 5 minutes

DONALD TRUMP’S critics have often accused him of buffoonery and isolationism. Yet even before taking office on January 20th he has shown how much those words fall short of what his second term is likely to bring. As the inauguration approaches, he has helped secure a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza. Busting taboos, he has bid for control over Greenland, with its minerals and strategic position in the Arctic. Mr Trump’s second term will not only be more disruptive than his first; it will also supplant a vision of foreign policy that has dominated America since the second world war.

For decades American leaders have argued that their power comes with the responsibility to be the indispensable defender of a world made more stable and benign by democracy, settled borders and universal values. Mr Trump will ditch the values and focus on amassing and exploiting power. His approach will be tested and defined in three conflicts: the Middle East, Ukraine and America’s cold war with China. Each shows how Mr Trump is impelled to break with recent decades: in his unorthodox methods, his accumulation and opportunistic use of influence, and his belief that power alone creates peace.

The Middle East illustrates his talent for unpredictability. The Israelis and Palestinians eventually agreed to a deal over Gaza because he created a deadline by threatening that “all hell would break loose” if they failed. He will need to keep pressing them if the deal is to progress to its later phases. Not since Richard Nixon has a president looked to behaving like a “madman” as a source of advantage.

Caprice is bolstered by pragmatism. Unlike most peacemakers, Mr Trump is blithely uninterested in the tortured history of the Middle East. The Abraham accords, signed in his first term, suggest that he will use the hostage release to promote a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which he sees as the route to prosperity—and a Nobel peace prize. Iran’s allies have been crushed in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. It may be ready to deal, too.

Yet the home of the three monotheistic religions will be a stern test of whether people really are willing to put aside their beliefs and their grievances for a shot at prosperity. Time and again, extremists on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides have vetoed peace plans by using violence to discredit the pragmatic centre. The Israeli right wants to annex Palestinian land. Iran is teetering between engagement with America and dashing for a nuclear bomb. What if the zealots and the mullahs get in Mr Trump’s way?

His answer will be to increase pressure using sanctions or the threat of force, or to walk away. That is also the choice he faces in Ukraine, where he has pledged to stop the fighting. Because he has more leverage over America’s allies than Vladimir Putin, the easier route is to walk away by ending support and so force concessions on the government in Kyiv—especially if, as his critics fear, he is flattered when Mr Putin deals with him as one alpha male to another. But that would undermine his other goals. Abandonment would court comparisons to Mr Biden and his hapless departure from Afghanistan. Mindful of comparisons with Taiwan, China might conclude he is a pushover. He may yet decide that being seen as ready to back Ukraine will strengthen his hand against Mr Putin.

An opportunistic use of power has some benefits. Mr Trump will continue to badger NATO members to spend more defending themselves against Russia, which is good. But it also has costs. NATO can probably survive Mr Trump’s threats to walk out, squabble over trade, support insurgent national conservative parties and bully Denmark over Greenland’s sovereignty. However, alliances thrive on trust. Putin-sympathising national conservatives will act as a poison. Allowing for its size, Denmark lost as many soldiers in Afghanistan as America did. Being arm-wrestled over Greenland is the sort of treatment that casts America as a threat, not a protector.

Despots will take comfort from a retreat from universal values. If Mr Trump asserts a sphere of American influence that embraces Canada, Greenland and Panama, they will claim it as an endorsement of their own principle that international relations have in reality always been a trial of strength—handy when Russia covets Georgia or China claims the South China Sea. If Mr Trump scorns institutions like the UN, which embody universal values, China and Russia will dominate them instead, and exploit them as conduits for their own interests.

The Trump camp argues that what counts is America’s strength, and that this will lead to peace with China. They warn of the need to prevent a third world war, observing that Xi Jinping wants to be capable of taking Taiwan by force by 2027. China is also rapidly building nuclear weapons and is systematically mastering strategic technologies. America, they say, needs to re-establish deterrence; and the panoply of “madman” diplomacy, pragmatism and the accumulation of economic and military strength is the way to do it.

Alas, when it comes to Taiwan, there is a contradiction. If the source of America’s strength is to be ruthlessly pragmatic about values, tough with allies and open to deals with opponents, then those are exactly the conditions for Mr Trump to trade Taiwan to China. Although the many China hawks in his administration would fight that, the very possibility points to a weakness at the heart of Mr Trump’s approach.

Pax Trumpiana

When the use of power is untethered by values, the result can be chaos on a global scale. If ultra-loyal, out-of-their-depth would-be disruptors like Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard are confirmed to head the Pentagon and intelligence, the chaos will spread on the inside, too. Mr Trump is ill-suited to separate his own interests from his country’s, especially if his and his associates’ money is at stake, as Elon Musk’s will be in China. By turning away from the values that made postwar America, Mr Trump will be surrendering the single greatest strength that his despotic opponents do not possess. ■